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The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel

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Roger Paulin

4. Bonn and India (1818-1845)1

Texte intégral

4.1 Bonn

‘Chevalier de plusieurs ordres’2

  • 1 For a general biographical account of Schlegel’s last years see Ruth Schirmer, August Wilhelm Schle (...)
  • 2 Knight of various orders’.

1The death of Madame de Staël marked for Schlegel the end of his middle years. He was now fifty, free and for the first time in thirteen years his own master. At first it was hard to take in. He accompanied the cortege—with himself, Auguste and the duke de Broglie as the chief mourners—that bore her body back to Coppet and saw it walled up in the family mausoleum, closed ever since. He was at liberty to remain in Coppet in his previous existence as a private scholar, but life would never be the same again. The Staël children, Auguste and Albertine, still saw him, with Fanny Randall, as part of the extended family and had no wish to exclude him after his long and sometimes selfless service to their mother. True, they challenged his title to the exclusive stewardship of her papers; in compensation, he was allowed the rights of Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution Française, and he translated into German Madame Necker de Saussure’s memoir of her famous cousin. With this, and the pension that Madame de Staël had agreed at the beginning of their association, he was comfortably off, and he had always put a little aside. The correspondence with the younger Staëls, the baron and the duchess, remained on the level of openness, not perhaps as children to a father, but certainly as nephews and nieces to an older uncle whom they were glad to see and whose foibles they tolerated. Albertine, among the three children the one with the greatest common sense and human understanding, also watched this avuncular figure with occasional and justified concern. They knew of his little vanities and made sure that they put ‘Chevalier de plusieurs ordres’ on the covers of their letters to him.

2Madame de Staël’s death was also a liberation from emotional and material servitude. He could move as he chose, not as she decreed. He could go to Paris or to London as his own man, in his own interests, not just when the spirit moved her. He could follow up those tentative movements towards a career that crop up in his correspondence with Favre, putting down roots after years of peregrination and nomadism. He was free to marry: she could no longer put a veto on his emotional life. That was the positive side. Perhaps this was not the appropriate time to take stock of what Madame de Staël had kept him from. For she had come at just the right moment to save him from the clutches of Sophie Tieck-Bernhardi and keep him at a distance from the emotional and matrimonial entanglements that ensued. It might not have been just jealousy, but also Staël‑Necker native shrewdness, that intervened to prevent Schlegel’s association with a married woman (Marianne Haller) or a much younger pious Catholic girl (Nina Hartl). (The Staël love life was of course a law unto itself). Even her daughter Albertine might have kept Schlegel back from what she was to call an ‘étourderie’, an act of folly, when eventually he did marry.

3Madame de Staël had always injected a healthy scepticism into their relationship, despite all those occasional pleadings, blandishments and near moral blackmails. She had kept his feet on the ground, reined in his quarrelsomeness, kept his tendency to speculation within bounds, had subjected him and his views to the sometimes merciless and always critical causerie of her circle. She had not completely bridled his vanity, but she could temper it by seating him next to a duke or introducing him to a princess (or a Prince Royal). With her, he would not have needed those later grandiloquent gestures like his twelve-roomed house in Bonn (she had somewhat more), his carriage, his liveried servant, and she would have spared him much of the associated ridicule that was to come his way because of it.

  • 3 See Josef Körner, Die Botschaft der deutschen Romantik an Europa, Schriften zur deutschen Literatur (...)

4She had shepherded him more than perhaps he realised; it was she who had set up the introductions that had made the Vienna Lectures such a success; it was her prompting that saw him enter Bernadotte’s service. True, critical writing and dealings with publishers had been his concern alone, and here he had shown himself to be assiduous and if need be hard-headed. But if one compared the Berlin lectures, which were fragmented and largely unpublished and delivered against a background of some emotional turmoil, with those in Vienna, with their carefully chosen audience, the comparative leisure in Coppet to see them to the press, and their enormous subsequent international reception3—Coleridge, Stendhal, Hugo, Oehlenschläger, Kierkegaard, Mickiewicz, Pushkin are among their most famous recipients—one could see what a difference the Staël component made.

Auguste and Albertine

  • 4 Krisenjahre der Frühromantik. Briefe aus dem Schlegelkreis, ed. Josef Körner, 3 vols (Brno, Vienna, (...)
  • 5 Souvenirs—1785-1870—du feu duc de Broglie, 3 vols (Paris : Calmann Lévy, 1886), II, 234-247.
  • 6 With whom Schlegel corresponded and to whom he passed on bibliographical details. Briefe von und an (...)
  • 7 Ch[arles] Galusky, ‘Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. A. W. de Schlegel’, Revue des deux mond (...)

5Thus it is only right that an account of Schlegel’s last years should begin under this long shadow of Madame de Staël as it spread over her children and grandchildren and continued to take him in as part of their extended family. For if he was now of his own choice at last again domiciled in Germany, much of his heart and affections were nevertheless still in France. ‘Stick the soul of a German into the mind [esprit] and body of a Frenchman, and you would have the perfect man’,4 was what he wrote to Auguste de Staël in 1821, a sentiment with which Alexander von Humboldt would not have disagreed. (Madame de Staël would have had an Englishman somewhere in the equation.) Of course this Staël-Broglie family was also staunchly anglophile. In 1822, Auguste de Staël and his brother-in-law Victor de Broglie spent some months in England, meeting the abolitionists Zachary Macaulay and Wilberforce, the economists Ricardo, Mill and Malthus, and the Holland House set.5 These connections also enabled Schlegel to be received with equally open arms in England in 1823. For all that he made use of his Hanoverian connections when it suited him, being part of a grand French family and sharing in their culture tipped the balance in favour of France. (It is not by chance that the only really useful biographical accounts of Schlegel in these later years are by Frenchmen, first by Philippe de Golbéry,6 the translator of Niebuhr, and after Schlegel’s death, by Charles Galusky.)7

  • 8 With a few exceptions, these letters are unpublished. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (4), 1- (...)
  • 9 Published in X. Doudan, Mélanges et lettres avec une introduction par M. le comte d’Haussonville et (...)

6The letters written to him by Albertine, duchess de Broglie, from 1818 to 1838, along with those from Victor de Broglie and their son Albert, bulk large in the corpus of Schlegel’s later correspondence.8 To them can be added the letters from Ximénès Doudan,9 the tutor to Alphonse de Rocca. One may regret that Schlegel’s own letters are missing, but no matter.

  • 10 August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, 12 vols [SW] (Leipzig: Weidmann (...)
  • 11 Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

7These are letters from a grand family—Victor de Broglie was to hold various important ministerial posts under Louis-Philippe from 1830 to 1834—but with no pretensions to grandeur, written from Coppet, from the château of Broglie in Normandy, and from their town house in Paris, 76, rue de Bourbon. It was a family that kept open house for the haute volée, but one would hardly know it from these letters. It elicited great works of art— Gérard’s painting ‘Corinne at Cape Miseno’ (1819), the lithograph of which Schlegel reviewed enthusiastically in 1822 in Sulpiz Boisserée’s Kunstblatt10 (and which his niece Auguste von Buttlar copied),11 Lamartine’s moving Cantique sur la mort de Madame la duchesse de Broglie of 1838, Ingres’s splendid portrait of Louise d’Haussonville, Albertine’s and Victor’s daughter (1845), and his even more wonderful preliminary drawings—but these letters do not hint at them.

  • 12 See Daniel Halévy, ‘La duchesse de Broglie’, Cahiers staëliens, 56 (2005), 117-167.
  • 13 Victor’s letters SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (4), 113-136 ; Albert, ibid., 102-136 ; Paul (...)
  • 14 Oeuvres de M. Auguste-Guillaume de Schlegel écrites en français, ed. Édouard Böcking, 3 vols (Leipz (...)

8Albertine12 writes of her family, the children that survived and those that did not, her state of mind and soul, her reading (always serious), her search for inner calm and assurance, and all this amid the social and political pressures that impinged. They tell of those left over from the old Coppet days, Auguste de Staël, whose death in 1827 saw the extinction of the male Staël line, or Alphonse de Rocca. They speak of good sense, reconciliation (of issues now unknown), of affection, even if not all of the Broglie family shared it. Victor’s letters are always matter-of–fact: he kept up the correspondence after Albertine’s death; Pauline wrote a dutiful letter in German, Louise one in French;13 Albert de Broglie, by contrast, the schoolboy and the later law student, wrote long and spirited letters that showed that he did not seem to mind the conundrums, comic verse (Pythagoras’s theorem explained in rhyming couplets)14 or corrections to his Latinity that interlarded Schlegel’s correspondence with him.

  • 15 Ibid., 189-201.

9Near the end of the correspondence come the two long letters that Schlegel and Albertine wrote to each other in 1838 on the subject of his religious affiliations; it is their only published exchange.15 It is to the pious, pietistic, Albertine and no-one else that he wrote that account of his religious development, his movements towards and away from Catholicism, his rejection of fanaticism and enthusiasm, his sense of a universal religion beyond confessions and affiliations. This to an Albertine who in 1829, one senses, had been more upset at the news of Friedrich Schlegel’s death than his own brother was.

  • 16 As far as can be ascertained, AWS stayed with them in Paris. Proust’s Madame de Villeparisis claime (...)
  • 17 Doudan, III, 9.

10Of course this is but one side of Schlegel’s later dealings with France. As it was, despite Albertine’s constant pleadings, he only visited them twice, in 1820‑21 and in 1832,16 and they came once, in 1834, to Bonn. There is no doubt that Broglie influence saw Schlegel introduced at court and receiving the Légion d’honneur. Ximénès Doudan agreed to cast an eye over the French in Schlegel’s articles for the Journal des débats.17 But the main part of Schlegel’s business in France was scholarly, and it was very largely in French that he was to display the breadth of those interests.

  • 18 I am quoting from the copy in AWS’s papers, SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XII (1-2). There is a (...)
  • 19 Mscr. Dresd. ibid.

11In the mean time, in the year immediately after Madame de Staël’s death, Schlegel’s links with the Staël-Broglie family were more mundane, matter‑of‑fact and mercenary. The will drawn up by Madame de Staël on 12 August, 1816, giving Schlegel the rights to her papers and especially to the manuscript later to be known as Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution Française, was a source of some vexation to the Staël heirs; seizing on the ‘laconisme’ of the will and its ‘actual intentions’, they had another document framed, dated 31 January 1818, which defined Schlegel’s rights but made it clear that they were their mother’s literary executors.18 Instead, he was to receive the sum of 34,500 francs, payable in instalments as the different volumes of Madame de Staël’s posthumous works appeared.19 The 10,000 francs that he received in February, 1818 would have come in useful as he began setting up house in Bonn in the summer of that year.

  • 20 As Ueber den Charakter und die Schriften der Frau von Staël von Frau Necker gebohrne von Saussure. (...)

12In keeping with the agreement, Schlegel’s name did not appear on the title page of the Considérations: he was still too much associated with the anti-French sentiments of the Comparaison and the Vienna Lectures. The reader would only learn of his part in the enterprise through a short mention in the preface. He was not to be entrusted with a general account of Madame de Staël’s life, either, this going to her cousin Madame Necker de Saussure, the translator of the Lectures. He in his turn was to translate this work into German.20

  • 21 Krisenjahre, III, 574f.
  • 22 Ibid., II, 333; III, 579. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XII (6a-e). Schlegel had already placed (...)

13It seems that Schlegel, usually very tidy in his financial affairs, had followed Auguste in placing some of his assets (well over £ 1,000) with the London banking house of Tottie and Compton. A bank crisis, brought about by Allied demands for immediate repayment of French war indemnities,21 caused Tottie and Compton to get into difficulties, then to declare bankruptcy and go into administration. Both Auguste and Schlegel were heavy losers. Schlegel showed the generosity of spirit that he always evinced towards the Staël sons, telling Auguste to take it philosophically: one only needed some etymology or some Homeric problems to take one’s mind off these matters!22

The European Celebrity

Fig. 23 August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cours de littérature dramatique. Traduit de l’allemand (Paris, Geneva, 1814). Title page of vol. 1.

Fig. 23 August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cours de littérature dramatique. Traduit de l’allemand (Paris, Geneva, 1814). Title page of vol. 1.

© And by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0.

  • 23 SW, VII, 285.
  • 24 Camille Pitollet, La Querelle caldéronienne de Johan Nikolas Böhl von Faber et José Joaquín de Mora (...)
  • 25 Albert Zipper, ‘Aus Odyniec’ Reisebriefen’, Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte 4 (1904) (...)

14What of Schlegel’s critical reputation? He was later to claim that his Vienna Lectures had spread his name and influence from ‘Cadiz to Edinburgh, Stockholm and St Petersburg’.23 By that he meant the cultivated readership, the educated elite. In terms of translations, his statement was certainly true. Whereas once, notably in his lectures on ‘Encyclopedia’ in Berlin (1803), he had shown a wide interest in national and historical cultures, his focus in the later years was directed at France and England, as the two places, the one with its institutes and libraries, the other with its overeas possessions, that could serve as the base for his all-consuming interest in India. Böhl von Faber, his Spanish translator and disciple, complained that Schlegel had buried himself in Sanskrit and had no further interest in things Hispanic (in fact, Schlegel disliked Böhl’s ‘reactionary’ politics).24 Adam Mickiewicz, on his visit to Schlegel in Bonn in 1829, found that his host evinced no interest in Polish matters and showed him Sanskrit manuscripts instead.25 Despite a continuing interest in Indo-European philology and etymology, the spread of languages from an primeval source, he defied all the evidence and excluded the Celts from this linguistic family.

  • 26 See generally the excellent account in Thomas G. Sauer, A. W. Schlegel’s Shakespearean Criticism in (...)
  • 27 Sauer, 61-64.

15Others saw it differently. It had started with De l’Allemagne. When that work finally appeared late in 1813, it put Schlegel into the wider context that it encompassed, with its thirty-first chapter of Book Two announcing ‘Des richesses littéraires de l’Allemagne et de ses critiques les plus renommés, A. W. et F. Schlegel’ [On the literary treasures of Germany and its most renowned critics] and its short but important section on the Vienna Lectures. Thus Schlegel’s name became associated with hers in the reviews of De l’Allemagne that followed.26 In Britain it would be Hazlitt’s and Sir James Mackintosh’s. These were to be followed by reviews of the French translation of the Lectures, Francis Hare-Naylor’s enthusiastic account in the Quarterly Review in 1815, and then by others of the English version which came out in the same year.27 Madame de Staël’s departure for France in 1814 had possibly prevented John Murray from taking on the English translation of the Vienna Lectures, but Robert Baldwin did so in 1815, with John Black as his translator.

  • 28 The preface states that it is adjusted to the needs of French readers. Cours de littérature dramati (...)
  • 29 Cf. Cours de littérature dramatique, II, 329.
  • 30 Cf. Black’s version of the same passage. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, by Au (...)
  • 31 Sauer, 100-109.
  • 32 Ibid., 116f.
  • 33 Ibid., 112.
  • 34 Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and His Times, 2 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1817), II, 614. See S. S (...)
  • 35 Krisenjahre, III, 584.

16Schlegel had every reason to be satisfied with this translation, especially when compared with Madame Necker de Saussure’s of it into French. Where hers made no pretence to doing a literal version (and got quite a few things wrong),28 Black’s made every effort to keep to the original. One need only compare a crux passage in each translation, the section on ancient and modern poetry, to see the difference. Hers is adjusted (as perhaps it must be) to the needs of French lexis;29 his tries to do justice to the nuances of Schlegel’s text.30 British critics were of course less interested in the quality of the translation than in its content; for here was a Shakespearean criticism that seemed quite different from Johnson or Richardson or Malone. Hazlitt’s enthusiastic review in the Edinburgh Review set the tone,31 and others, notably Thomas Campbell,32 were to follow, not counting almost the whole British Romantic school who knew the work, Byron, Scott, Southey, Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth.33 Nathan Drake, the first Shakespearean biographer of this generation, was indebted to ‘the admirable Schlegel’.34 Small wonder that Sir James Mackintosh could write, to Schlegel’s considerable gratification, that he was ‘our National Critic’.35

  • 36 Sauer, 81-100. The issue of Coleridge’s debt to Schlegel, which has engendered much controversy, is (...)

17Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as is now well known, had come to Schlegel through the Vienna Lectures in the German original, when in 1812 and 1813 he lectured in London and Bristol on drama and Shakespeare.36 Leaving aside questions of indebtedness (or plagiarism), the real point is that Coleridge’s reading of Schlegel introduced into English Shakespearean criticism the images and philosophical terminology of German idealism and the historical sense of German Romanticism. Thus the organicist language that Coleridge employed in his critical writing was indebted to Herder, the common source for Schlegel but also for Schelling. When in 1823 he made his first longer visit to London in his newly-assumed status as a Sanskritist, Schlegel was already a European celebrity on account of the wide dissemination and reception of his Vienna Lectures. They were his major asset; they were what most people associated with his name.

  • 37 Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, ed. William Beattie, 3 vols (London: Moxon, 1849), II, 257.
  • 38 Ibid., 355.
  • 39 Ibid., 363.
  • 40 Cyrus Redding, Fifty Years’ Recollections, Literary and Personal, With Observations of Men and Thin (...)
  • 41 Ibid., 235.
  • 42 Cyrus Redding, Yesterday and Today, 3 vols (London: Cautley Newby, 1863), II, 5-71, ref. 48.

18It is fair to say that the English-language reaction to Schlegel was very largely reflected in Shakespeare criticism, coming as it did at a time of reaction against Johnsonian strictures or Richardsonian character study. It was natural for the British to seize on what was familiar—or, until they read Schlegel, was thought to be familiar. For others, he had many more aspects. Thomas Campbell had known Schlegel since the Staël days,37 but in Bonn he saw a different side. Bonn itself as an institution gave him the first idea for a university along German lines, out of which London’s University College would eventually emerge.38 Schlegel—despite, or even because of his penchant to hold forth—was a man of letters with a difference,39one who on the basis of having to translate the works into German, knew Shakespeare better than most of the Bard’s countrymen.40 Cyrus Redding, Campbell’s assistant editor on the New Monthly Review from 1821 to 1830, found that he had ‘nothing of the pedant, and for a German scholar much of a man of the world’.41 Perhaps this was the reason why Redding devoted more space to Schlegel than to Goethe in his important conspectus of the German literature that seemed significant in his lifetime, tracing Schlegel’s development (even translating that ‘Union of the Arts with the Church’ poem that Schlegel had now in part retracted).42

  • 43 Theodor Zeiger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutsch-englischen Litteraturbeziehungen III: Wordswor (...)
  • 44 Julian Charles Young, A Memoir of Charles Mayne Young, Tragedian, with Extracts from his Son’s Jour (...)
  • 45 Thomas Colley Grattan, Beaten Paths; and Those Who Trod Them, 2 vols (London: Chapman Hall, 1862), (...)
  • 46 Young, I, 180.
  • 47 Ibid., 174f.

19Coleridge and Wordsworth visited Schlegel briefly during the summer of 1828 during their tour of the Moselle and Rhine. Needless to say, both came with a pre-knowledge of things German, in Wordsworth’s case fairly extensive,43 in Coleridge’s hugely eclectic. Coleridge, whom one campanion described as resembling a ‘dissenting minister’ in appearance44 (Wordsworth like a ‘mountain farmer’),45 conversed volubly with a bewigged Schlegel; that is, once their language problems had been resolved. Coleridge’s German was rusty, forcing Schlegel to say: ‘Mein lieber Herr, would you speak English: I understand it; but your German I cannot follow’.46 That worked: there was reciprocal praise of Schlegel’s Shakespeare and of Coleridge’s Wallenstein. If Coleridge had read Schlegel’s less than enthusiastic remarks on Schiller, he did not let on. On Scott and Byron they disagreed (Wordsworth too);47 for Schlegel, as indeed for most nineteenth-century German readers, they remained the paramount representatives of English letters.

  • 48 This cannot be the place for a full discussion of Schlegel in France. This has been supplied by Che (...)
  • 49 Such as Hugo’s borrowing of Schlegel’s distinction between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘organic’. Chri (...)
  • 50 Jahrbücher der Literatur, VII (1819), 80-155; most accessible in: Solger’s nachgelassene Schriften (...)
  • 51 Navagajara, 230.

20In France, of course, things were different.48 As said, for obvious reasons, Schlegel was caught up in the reception of De l’Allemagne, but his name was also involved in much more: the formation of opinion on Schiller, and above all the massive presence of Shakespeare. French readers were aware that the Vienna Lectures were not the first of Schlegel’s challenges to their drame classique. Although neither of the two great acts of defiance against the dominance of classical French drama—Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) and Victor Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell (1827)—was directly influenced by Schlegel’s formulations, the polarisations that underlay them had something of the abrupt and occasionally arbitrary distinctions that came with Romantic thought.49 (Interestingly enough, the most thorough and thoughtful German review of the Vienna Lectures, by Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, who had been in the audience in Berlin, took issue with this, for him, ‘artificial’ forcing apart of cultures and traditions.)50 Of course the ‘accommodations’ that Madame Necker de Saussure had made may have rendered these partitions less forcible in French (her translation was also used as the basis for the Italian version of the Lectures, not Schlegel’s original).51 The point stands nevertheless.

  • 52 See esp. John Isbell, ‘Présence de Coppet et romantisme libéral en France, 1822-1827’, in : Françoi (...)
  • 53 Isbell (1998), 397.
  • 54 Krisenjahre, II, 343.

21Schlegel’s name remained associated first and foremost with the old members of the ‘Groupe de Coppet’—Bonstetten, Constant, Sismondi, Barante—and its younger survivors—Auguste de Staël and Victor de Broglie—and their circles of political and literary influence.52 Although his name did not appear on the title page, Schlegel had been as much involved as they had in the production of Staël’s Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution Française. Auguste’s edition of Dix Années d’exil, in which Schlegel’s role was given some prominence (perhaps not as much as he deserved) had come out in 1823, with nice timing, to coincide with the Napoleonic apologia, Émmanuel‑Auguste‑Dieudonné de Las Casas’s Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène.53 Schlegel, now fully engaged in the Prussian Rhineland, could not share their liberal political and social views except as a disinterested observer; writing resignedly to Auguste de Staël in 1819, he concluded that ‘Germany was fine, so long as one did not get involved in politics’.54

  • 55 Opuscula quae Augustus Guilelmus Schlegelius Latine scripta reliquit. Collegit et edidit Eduardus B (...)

22Thus it is interesting to find Schlegel producing his own ‘Ten Years of Exile’, not in French, not even in German, but in Latin, in his oration as outgoing rector of Bonn university in 1825. He set out briefly his anti-Napoleonic credentials, covering with Latin brevitas what Madame de Staël had expanded in her extensive self-justification.55 These remarks were delivered under the shadow of the Carlsbad Decrees, with colleagues in trouble, Ernst Moritz Arndt silenced and Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker not completely exonerated. They are also an exhortation to political prudence and avoidance of extremes. Only in 1828, under great provocation from Johann Heinrich Voss, did Schlegel ‘go public’ in German about his role in the struggle against the Usurper (unlike Voss in his ‘Heidelberg cabbage-patch’), part of a general critique of fanatical anti-Romanticism. In his role as a university professor, however, he had to be careful about what he said. As we shall see, his most trenchant remarks of a political nature were to be about British India, not Europe.

  • 56 Krisenjahre, II, 390-392. On this undertaking see John Isbell, ‘Les Chefs-d’oeuvre des théâtres étr (...)
  • 57 Erich Schmidt, ‘Ein verschollener Aufsatz A. W. Schlegels über Goethes “Triumph der Empfindsamkeit“ (...)
  • 58 Isbell, 120.

23Auguste consulted Schlegel over the choice of the German texts to be included in Pierre-François Ladvocat’s huge twenty-five-volume undertaking, Chefs-d’oeuvre des théâtres étrangers [Masterpieces of Foreign Theatre] (1821‑23).56 He, his brother-in-law Broglie, Barante and Constant were to be among the contributors (and in the event were not). Schlegel, now claiming to have nothing but contempt for literature and to be interested only in ‘antediluvian poetry’, suggested Werner’s Der vierundzwanzigste Februar [The Twenty-Fourth of February] that had been one of the highlights of the Coppet circle back in 1808. But why not Goethe’s Faust? (He had already given some tips to an English translator.)57 Above all, they must do Calderón. As it happened, El princípe constante, the play that Schlegel had once translated, featured among these chefs-d’oeuvre.58

  • 59 ‘Sur Othello, traduit en vers français par M. Alfred de Vigny, et sur l’état de l’art dramatique en (...)

24Whether Schlegel had cause to be pleased with an article by Broglie in the liberal Revue française in 1830, is open to question.59 In a review of Othello, Broglie took the opportunity of examining some of the causes of post-Napoleonic French Shakespeare enthusiasm—idolatry. He rehearsed Schlegel’s old strictures against Racine or Molière: clearly they still rankled. He subjected to an ironic deflation Schlegel’s high esteem for all aspects of Shakespeare, applying the criteria of good taste and proper sense.

  • 60 As for instance the section ‘De la littérature dramatique chez les modernes’. Le Catholique, ouvrag (...)
  • 61 Le Catholique, VI (1827), 531-612, ref. 607.

25Yet even this article, from within the Staël circle, showed that one could not be indifferent to Schlegel, even if there was no question of his being declared, as in England, the ‘national critic’. Of the French periodicals from the 1820s it was perhaps Le Catholique (1826-29) that came closest to the spirit of critical enquiry for which Schlegel stood. Edited by the convert Baron d’Eckstein, it was not above taking over whole tracts of Schlegel’s criticism;60 its openness to other literatures—Slavonic, Germanic, Indian, Arabic—and its attempt to feel the pulse of European literary culture, aligned it in some ways with what Schlegel had once stood for. Yet it was the statement in this periodical, made in 1827, ‘M. A. G. de Schlegel est à moitié catholique’61 [M. A. G. Schlegel is half Catholic] that was to lead to Schlegel’s riposte and his final break with his brother Friedrich.

  • 62 On Böhl see Carol Tully, Johann Nikolas Böhl von Faber (1770-1836). A German Romantic in Spain (Car (...)

26The position in Spain was different again. To explain the item ‘Cadiz’ in Schlegel’s later self-promoting account of his Vienna Lectures and their dissemination, we have to bring in the name of Johann Nikolas Böhl von Faber.62 A younger contemporary of Schlegel’s, Böhl differed from his British or French counterparts in that, though German, he had a Spanish wife, and from 1813 lived in Cadiz and played an active part in making known there those parts of Schlegel’s Lectures that bore on Spain and its dramatic culture. Moreover Böhl had in 1813 become a convert to Catholicism. His reception of Schlegel thus shows much of the zeal of the newly converted in an adopted country, one already noted for the pervasiveness of its religious culture.

  • 63 This letter is published by Josef Körner, ‘Johann Nikolas Böhl von Faber und August Wilhelm Schlege (...)
  • 64 Pitollet, 75; Reyes Ponce, 108f.
  • 65 Tully, 176.
  • 66 SW, VIII, 283.

27Not only that: Böhl and his wife Frasquita had been early admirers of the Vienna Lectures as they came out, not least the sections on the Spanish drama that appeared in 1811. She even wrote (in Spanish) in 1813 to Schlegel in Stockholm, expressing her high esteem and appending three poems written in the metre of the romance by their friend (and later polemical adversary) José Joaquín de Mora.63 Schlegel replied (in French) in mid- April,64 full of the hope that Spain, now freed of the French yoke, might learn from English and German literature and bring about the revival and rejuvenation of their national culture. When Böhl began to identify with the restoration in Spain, Schlegel turned away from him completely:65 it was part of his general reflection, not so much on ‘reaction’, as on the aftermath of upheaval, a general recidivism into superstition and fanaticism that he was increasingly to associate with his brother Friedrich.66

28Böhl’s is a more extreme case of the transference of Schlegel’s Lectures into a foreign medium. It can of course be argued that Schlegel’s text ceased to be his own once the conventions of another language took over and the translator sought equivalents for a hitherto alien critical terminology. Böhl however went further than Madame Necker de Saussure or John Black: he translated only Lectures Twelve and Fourteen of Schlegel’s cycle, the two that, respectively, compared English and Spanish drama, and characterized the Spanish dramatic tradition.

29Böhl could not resist the opportunity of giving Schlegel’s careful formulations a political edge that the original did not have. True, Schlegel was in 1808 lecturing to a Habsburg audience, aware of the historical links between Austria and Spain. His account of the Spanish Golden Age, although mythologically underpinned, was not intended to glorify it uncritically, but rather to explain how a high culture came about. The same could be said of his account of the age of Elizabeth. Even so, he did leave the impression that nothing of substance had happened in the cultural life and on the stage in both countries since these high moments in their history. Böhl was less nuanced in his approach. 1814—the date of his translation—was not 1808, and he could express hopes for a recrudescence of the Siglo de Oro in the terms of the more strident German advocates of the idea of nationhood, like Fichte or Görres. This involved the attenuation of Schlegel’s fine distinctions and the blurring into one account of his strictures against neo-classical culture and his advocacy of a national drama in a national state. With this, Böhl also stepped into controversies relating to current Spanish politics (the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy) and literature (the dominance of classical taste in Spain).

  • 67 Körner, Botschaft, 73f.
  • 68 Roman Koropeckyj, Adam Mickiewicz. The Life of a Romantic (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 2008), 129; (...)
  • 69 On Schlegel’s knowledge of the Slavs see Josef Körner, ‘Die Slawen im Urteil der deutschen Romantik (...)
  • 70 Dorota Masiakowska, ‘Die Infamie der Diffamie—Zur Abwertung der Slawen bei Ernst Moritz Arndt und A (...)

30The enthusiastic reception of the Vienna Lectures in the Slavic lands remained completely one-sided.67 There is no evidence that Schlegel knew who Pushkin was, let alone being aware of the Russian’s admiration. Adam Mickiewicz was to learn this in 1829 when he called in on Schlegel in Bonn on his way from Weimar. It had been one of the few high points in an otherwise fruitless journey.68 Schlegel’s memories of his travels in Slavic parts were restricted to the grand receptions accorded to Madame de Staël, and he showed no interest in Poland or the Slavs in general. Politically, he supported the Tsar (a Staëlian legacy), and he seems to have been unconcerned at Russian (or Austrian) domination of other Slavic peoples. None of this had prevented his Vienna Lectures, mainly in Madame Necker de Saussure’s version, from becoming a force in the formulation of Slavic national aspirations in literature.69 It was his colleague in Bonn, Ernst Moritz Arndt, who was to utter anti-Polish remarks; but he had travelled through the Polish lands in 1812, and his negative judgment was based on the worst possible image, and on his desire to return from the perceived ‘chaos’ to the ‘order’ of his native Germany.70

Friedrich Schlegel in Frankfurt

  • 71 Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols [KA] (Paderborn, Munich, Vie (...)
  • 72 George Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals, 2 vols (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1876), I, 101. R (...)
  • 73 KA, XXIX, 420.

31The death of Madame de Staël and August Wilhelm’s decision to return to Germany also brought about a change in the relations between the brothers Schlegel. Metternich finally overcame his scruples (but only just) and appointed Friedrich legation secretary to the Imperial Diet in Frankfurt am Main (‘Legationsrath bei der k.k. Gesandtschaft am Deutschen Bundestag’)71 with a salary of 3,000 florins, finally satisfying his ambition of being a member of the Austrian imperial official class. From this time on, too, he was signing himself ‘von Schlegel’. It was from here that he made those various appeals to August Wilhelm to return to Germany, to the Rhine, to Bavaria, to Vienna as secretary of some Academy of Sciences not yet in being. Part of this was the need for his brother’s company and intellectual stimulus, for his letters betray a continuing interest in things Sanskrit (which produced notes, nothing more), and encouragement to August Wilhelm to complete his editions of the Nibelungenlied or of Shakespeare. Of course there was no question of their meeting up until the older brother was freed of his commitments to the Staël family in 1818. All was not as well as it seemed. Dorothea did not join Friedrich for the whole time, and then their quarters were unsatisfactory. In 1818 and 1819 she was an entire year in Italy keeping a solicitous eye on the artistic development of her sons Johannes and Philipp Veit (when not at Mass or otherwise piously engaged). Friedrich’s health was indifferent, and his eating disorder if anything worse: George Ticknor, while stimulated by his conversation, found in Friedrich ‘a short, thick little gentleman, with the ruddy vulgar health of a full-fed father of the Church’.72 Friedrich had hoped for a post with the Austrian legation in Rome, and accepting Frankfurt as second-best, he found his work dull, his colleagues uncongenial and his superior ‘imbecilic’.73 They in their turn were not best pleased that he claimed a special relationship with Metternich. Even so, Friedrich’s notions of the organic unity of all nations in the imperial German federation did not go down well in Metternich’s circles, where maintaining Austrian hegemony was to the fore.

  • 74 Ibid., 370f.
  • 75 Cf. Johannes Bobeth, Die Zeitschriften der Romantik (Leipzig: Haessel, 1911), 288.

32Above all, Friedrich felt that he was not being given recognition as a writer and an intellectual. Already in 1817 he was asking Schleiermacher if he would not like to contribute to a periodical, perhaps setting out a Protestant view of things.74 Seeing that this was to become Concordia, a journal with pronounced Catholic leanings and solely Catholic contributors, it is not surprising that Schleiermacher showed no interest.75 For the moment, Friedrich had recourse to the journal that enjoyed Metternich’s favour, the Vienna Jahrbücher der Literatur, that had started in 1818. Friedrich stands out among the contributors, most of them more moderate than he, men who unlike him were part of the nineteenth-century advance of the humanist disciplines into academia: the Austrian historian and statesman Joseph von Hormayr, the distinguished orientalist Joseph von Hammer- Purgstall, Goethe’s informant for the West-östlicher Divan (1819), Friedrich von Raumer, soon to be professor of history in Berlin and a friend of Tieck’s, or Johann Gustav Büsching, the medievalist. It was for this journal that Karl Wilhelm Solger, also a professor in Berlin, wrote his important review of August Wilhelm’s Vienna Lectures.

  • 76 First in Kunst und Alterthum. Von Goethe, 6 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1816-27), I, ii, [5]-62.
  • 77 Ueber die Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Rom, im Frühjahr 1819, und über den gegenwärtigen Stand der (...)

33Friedrich Schlegel, as he watched his brother August Wilhelm move into these circles, felt increasingly excluded and embattled. He and Dorothea (especially she) had felt outrage that Goethe in the first parts of his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth] (1811-14) had not acknowledged Friedrich’s part in the rediscovery of medieval and religious art. After Goethe’s journey to the Rhine and Main in 1814-15 with Friedrich’s protégé Sulpiz Boisserée and the publication of his periodical Ueber Kunst und Alterthum [On Art and Antiquity] it might seem that he was becoming more reconciled to the religious Middle Ages. But then in 1817 had come that affront to Romantic sensitivities, Heinrich Meyer’s Neu- deutsche religios-patriotische Kunst [New German Religious-Patriotic Art], fully sponsored by Goethe.76 Friedrich, the step-father of the Veit brothers, at that moment in Rome and in the forefront of the group of German religious artists that called itself the Nazarenes, was prompted to issue a counterblast in the Jahrbücher der Literatur,77 but essentially the damage had been done. It had been written when Friedrich was finally recalled from Frankfurt and had at last visited Italy in 1819 in the suite of Prince Metternich himself.

  • 78 KA, XXIX, 367.
  • 79 Ibid., 864f.

34When the two brothers did meet up again in Frankfurt in May, 1818, after a six-year separation, August Wilhelm had already been in negotiation with the Prussian authorities and, having been offered Berlin, was also asked to consider Bonn. Friedrich expected imminently to be recalled to Austria (this did not happen until much later in the year), so time was of the essence. There was so much to catch up on; August Wilhelm had been sent the prospectus of Concordia,78 so he knew where his brother stood on the religious and political issues which that periodical would raise. The younger brother found August Wilhelm in good heart and much less given to fractious behaviour; in fact Friedrich von Gentz maliciously contrasted the ‘Schlegel of steel’ (August Wilhelm) with the ‘Schlegel of lead’ (Friedrich).79

35Almost immediately, the brothers set off on a journey down the Rhine. The Congress of Princes had been announced, to take place in Aachen: there might be notabilities to meet in the vicinity. In Nassau (Bad Ems) it was Baron Stein: political events had overtaken all of them since St Petersburg and Paris, and Stein was no friend of the current political reaction. There too they met Grand Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar and August von Kotzebue, important figures from the past. From Mainz, they went to Coblenz, where the new and the old Prussia converged, with Joseph Görres, the Rhenish patriot, soon to be exiled for sedition, and General von Müffling, who had been military governor of Paris. In Bonn, which August Wilhelm now saw for the first time, they met his future colleague, Ernst Moritz Arndt, whose views on Schlegel had changed but little since they had seen each other in St Petersburg (less than two years later, he would be another victim of Prussian reaction). The down-river journey ended in Cologne, the town that had missed out to Bonn for the choice of the new Rhenish university.

  • 80 Krisenjahre, II, 318.

36Friedrich now took the waters in Wiesbaden, while August Wilhelm returned to Heidelberg, to write his first lectures, which would be delivered in Bonn, not in Berlin. Friedrich, knowing of his brother’s negotiations with the Prussian authorities and his decision to go to Bonn, counselled him to discuss this matter with the state chancellor Hardenberg himself (an old Hanoverian). The Congress of Princes was now to be in Coblenz (16-22 September): it was imperative that August Wilhelm go there in person. This he did, accompanied by his teenage brother-in-law, Wilhelm Paulus. In Coblenz, he met Hardenberg and his secretary David Ferdinand Koreff and proceeded to Bonn to find the house in the Sandkaule in which he was to remain until his death. He also made arrangements with Fanny Randall for his library to be transferred from Coppet to Bonn.80

  • 81 FS actually asks for between 200 and 300 florins. KA, XXIX, 519; ibid., 885 says 200.

37It was during these days and months, Friedrich’s last in Frankfurt, as the saga of his marriage unfolded, that August Wilhelm had good reason to be grateful for his brother’s wisdom and calming influence. Although himself facing outlays for house and travel, August Wilhelm made a loan to Friedrich of up to 300 florins to see him safely re-installed in Vienna:81 it was this advance that was to cause such vexation ten years later when August Wilhelm requested its repayment.

  • 82 Ibid., XXX, 298-300.
  • 83 Jahrbücher der Literatur, VIII (1819), 413-468.
  • 84 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XXVIII, 42.

38They were never to see each other again. For the moment, their letters (Friedrich’s) suggested a good deal of common interest—in the Troubadours, in the Indische Bibliothek.82 Friedrich’s review of Johann Gottlieb Rhode’s Ueber den Anfang unserer Geschichte und die letzte Revolution der Erde [On The Beginnings of our History and the Last Revolution of the Earth]83 in 1819 dealt with matters similar to August Wilhelm’s set of Bonn lectures Einleitung in die allgemeine Weltgeschichte [Introduction to a General History of the World] (first delivered in 1821)—the evidence of mythology, the theory of the earth, the origins of language, the rise of religious belief— and they drew on a common set of sources. August Wilhelm even quoted Friedrich’s review with approval.84

  • 85 Concordia. Eine Zeitschrift herausgegeben von Friedrich Schlegel, 6 parts (Vienna: Wallishauser, 18 (...)
  • 86 Concordia, Vorrede, 1.
  • 87 Krisenjahre, II, 342.

39It was a different matter when Concordia made its appearance.85 This short-lived periodical—Friedrich’s last—was written, as his preface stated, in response to the ‘times, troubled and confused’.86 By that he meant the events since 1818, the murder of Kotzebue, the Carlsbad Decrees, the persecution of the so-called ‘demagogues’, the revolutions in Spain, Portugal and Italy, the murder of the duke de Berry, the revolt in Greece, the repressions in Italy. It was no doubt these factors that led Metternich to tolerate this journal, for he might justifiably have believed that the settlements of the Congresses of Vienna were beginning to unravel. It was different in Prussia, as August Wilhelm was learning in unrevolutionary Bonn. Joseph Görres, in Coblenz in Rhenish Prussia, had in his Europa und die Revolution of 1821 addressed essentially the same issues as Friedrich had in 1819, but with less caution. It could not be published in Prussia,87 and its author only just escaped arrest and spent the next eight years in exile in Strasbourg.

40To that extent, both Schlegel brothers were reacting to the ‘Zeitgeist’. August Wilhelm’s counteraction had been to seek withdrawal from political events; Friedrich’s was to confront them head on. His long article ‘Signatur des Zeitalters’ [Mark of the Times] that extended through the whole of Concordia, was quick to find reasons for, as he saw it, the moral decline of the nations, and was equally prompt to advance the means for their regeneration, through the organic unity of church, state and the educational outreach of the state. This Metternich could hardly object to, although he may not have cared for some of the other contributors, a Catholic and conservative rump, most of them converts, dedicated to restoration and (some might say) reaction: Franz von Baader, Zacharias Werner, Adam Müller, Karl Ludwig von Haller.

Marriage

  • 88 The poems known as ‘Trilogie der Leidenschaft’.

41Then in 1818 Schlegel decided to marry Sophie Paulus. Every instinct ought to have told him that he was embarking on something unadvised, unwise, foolish. But perhaps that is merely wisdom after the event. He saw no reason why at the age of nearly 51 he should not marry and start a family. Having been close to others’ children, seeing them grow up (or, in the case of Auguste Böhmer and Albert de Staël, cruelly cut off), he had a natural desire to have his own. He wanted what his colleagues-to-be in Bonn had, Arndt, Niebuhr, Windischmann: a household presided over by a capable wife, and full of children. And why not? He knew no physical reasons why this should not happen, and he was never short of romantic gallantries. True, there was an age-gap: Sophie was just short of her twenty-eighth birthday when they married, but the nineteenth century was very matter- of-fact about such unions. In 1823 at Carlsbad none other than Goethe (aged nearly 74) was paying assiduous court to a nineteen-year-old and even asking for her hand. Goethe is forgiven this act of silliness because her rejection produced some of his most moving late poetry.88 Schlegel’s portion was different. In the tradition of European comedy, where old men with young wives are a stock burlesque motif, he was instead to be the butt of ridicule.

  • 89 Briefe, II, 153.

42It is also the case that those who gave him good advice when all had gone wrong, Albertine de Broglie and his own brother Friedrich, did not intervene until it was too late. Madame de Staël, as Albertine wrote, would certainly have kept him from this folly had she been alive.89 The trouble was that she had also stunted Schlegel’s emotional life and left him open to this kind of amorous infatuation. In fact nobody emerges especially well from this whole unfortunate affair, which cast a shadow over the rest of Schlegel’s life.

43It was natural that Schlegel, coming to Heidelberg after the Rhine trip with his brother, should pay his respects to the Paulus family. The theologian Friedrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus and his wife Caroline had been friendly with the whole Romantic circle during his days as a professor in Jena; it had even been rumoured that Schlegel had flirted with Caroline (she wrote novels under the pseudonym of Eleutheria Holberg). Certainly the Paulus house in Jena had been the first to welcome Friedrich and Dorothea, and the friendship had lasted. Among the many children to be found in this Romantic circle was Sophie Karoline Eleutherie Paulus, a little younger than Auguste Böhmer, a little older than Philipp Veit (or Albertine de Staël). The Paulus parents had of course known Goethe and Schiller; in fact Goethe later visited them in Heidelberg, and the ‘cup- bearer’ (‘Mundschenk’) in his West-östlicher Divan is said to be based on Wilhelm, the young and short-lived Paulus son. Paulus had taken part in the great exodus from Jena, had gone like Schelling to Würzburg, and was now, a surviving representative of eighteenth-century rationalist exegetical criticism, a professor in Heidelberg. It was he who had been responsible for his fellow-Swabian Hegel coming to this university before his translation to Berlin.

  • 90 On this and on the whole affair see Karl Alexander von Reichlin-Meldegg, Friedrich Eberhard Gottlob (...)
  • 91 On Jean Paul’s visits to Heidelberg and whole affair see Helmut Pfotenhauer, Jean Paul. Das Leben a (...)

44The Paulus family knew everyone of note in Heidelberg: Friedrich Creuzer, Greek scholar and mythologist; Johann Heinrich Voss, Schlegel’s old adversary (and to be Creuzer’s),90 and the brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée, Friedrich Schlegel’s former protégés who had brought a good part of their important collection of Old German art to Heidelberg in 1810. They also knew Jean Paul, and it was perhaps unfortunate that the celebrated novelist (especially among his female readers) was in Heidelberg at exactly the same time as Schlegel.91

  • 92 ‘De l’Allemagne par Mme la Baronne de Staël-Holstein’ (1814), Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke. Historisc (...)
  • 93 Ibid., 3. Abt. Briefe. 9 vols, VII, 228.

45There was no love lost between the two (it did not help that Jean Paul was friendly with the Voss family). Jean Paul had never been part of a ‘school’; he had preserved his own independence of mind. His review of Corinne had been faint praise. Now there was his account of De l’Allemagne.92 It had essentially called into doubt the ability of a foreign author and critic to subject a literary culture not her own to scrutiny and judgment. It (rightly) questioned the capacity of another language to render the essential subtleties of German (including Jean Paul’s). It found questionable the assertion that German poetry owed so much of its worth to its openness to other literatures. Was Jean Paul’s own style not quintessentially German? In all this Schlegel had merely been Staël’s ‘concubine’ (‘Kebsmann’),93 a sentiment Jean Paul fortunately reserved for a letter.

  • 94 Walter Harich, Jean Paul (Leipzig : Haessel, 1928), 787.
  • 95 ‘Geckerei und Glanzsucht’, Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, VII, 219.

46But finding Schlegel staying at the same hotel was altogether too galling.94 Jean Paul received an ovation from citizenry and students. Schlegel was also to have one, but it was feared it might be mistaken for a homage to another guest, the heir to the deposed king of Sweden. It was better to avoid a diplomatic incident. Worse still, Jean Paul found that the ‘fop’95 Schlegel was ingratiating himself into the Paulus household. For Jean Paul, although long married, was nevertheless not averse to a little flirtation—as here with both the Paulus mother and daughter—that bordered on the amorous and sometimes even crossed that threshold. Now Schlegel of all people was about to snatch Sophie from under his nose.

  • 96 Briefe, II, 329f.
  • 97 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (23), 112.
  • 98 Reichlin-Meldegg, II, 200.

47Schlegel meanwhile had caught sight of Sophie Paulus. Who could be better suited to be a professor’s wife than someone with good looks, who also knew French, English and Latin and who played the piano beautifully? Writing to Koreff in Berlin, his former physician and now his academic adviser, he could say that she was a ‘jewel’.96 The parents seemed convinced of his suitability to be their son-in-law (they asked his colleague Welcker for a character reference).97 And Schlegel used all the charm, gallantry and coquetry at his disposal. It was a pity that his brother Friedrich, also an occasional guest in the Paulus house, had not advised him earlier against adopting a hectoring and superior tone towards Sophie (‘Hofmeisterton’). But for the moment all was well. The couple were engaged at the end of July and married in the Providenzkirche, the smaller of the two city‑centre Protestant churches in Heidelberg, on 30 August. In the register Schlegel was given the noble title of ‘Freiherr’, with his Swedish and Russian orders; Sophie was a mere ‘spinster’ (‘Jungfer’).98 Melchior Boisserée stood in for the father, who was indisposed.

  • 99 Briefe, I, 336f.
  • 100 This letter is partly published by Paul Kaufmann, ‘Auf den Spuren August Wilhelm von Schlegels’, Pr (...)

48More than that we do not safely know. All as yet seemed fine. She called him in jest ‘Herr Rembrandt’, as perhaps befitted an academic husband, but signed a letter, hardly two weeks into their marriage, as ‘Kind’ (‘child’).99 His in-laws, as was customary, addressed him as ‘Herr Sohn’, he them as ‘Frau Mutter’ and ‘Herr Vater’. Yet things soon took a turn for the worse. It is only fair to hear Schlegel’s own account. Writing on 10 January 1819 to the lawyer Jacob Lambertz in Bonn, Schlegel set out what he believed to be the course of events.100

  • 101 Krisenjahre, II, 320f.
  • 102 This letter in Briefe, I, 341f.
  • 103 Ibid., 342f.
  • 104 Ibid., 343-347.

49He had, he stated, entered into the marriage in good faith, and it had been based on mutual affection. He had agreed with the Prussian authorities to go to Bonn, instead of Berlin as originally mooted, in order for his new wife to be nearer her parents in Heidelberg and to spare her the rigours of the Berlin climate. Thus the decision to go to the new Rhenish university had been taken very largely on her account, and her parents had never raised any objection to their proposed removal to Bonn. Ten days after their wedding he had needed to attend to university matters and see the chancellor Hardenberg in Coblenz, the second of Schlegel’s two Rhine journeys in that year. The letters that they exchanged had been affectionate. Writing to Auguste de Staël he was full of marital bliss.101 On his return, this time to Stuttgart where the Paulus family was staying, he noticed a difference, which he put down to his mother-in-law’s interference. Sophie then contracted measles. On her recovery, ‘she came every morning to his bed’ (presumably not just to pass the time of day). When it became clear that Schlegel was indeed going to take her beloved Sophie from her and install her in Bonn, Frau Paulus went into paroxysms (‘convulsivische Wuth’). They returned to Heidelberg; on 1 November he had to leave for Bonn, to set up house for the two of them. Sophie shed tears when he went. By mid‑November the tone had worsened. It was clear that Sophie was not going to join him in Bonn. Paulus stepped in and took over the correspondence. There were no more letters from Sophie, and nobody seems to have consulted her further on what was to be her fate. Paulus came straight to the point with Schlegel: no amount of ostentation and luxury (the house in Bonn) would compensate for what, he added darkly, he ‘now knew’.102 Schlegel, responding, then insisted not only on ‘faith and love’ but also his legal marital rights.103 This elicited from Paulus a terrible letter104 that accused Schlegel of all manner of lasciviousness with his innocent daughter, coupled with physical impotence. By this account Schlegel had entered into marriage under false pretences and without the necessary ‘powers’:

You dared to speak of knowing your sacred legal rights, whereas what you really know is that you planned to sacrifice to enervated voluptuousness and vanity the deepest love, health and life’s enjoyment of the purest, most noble and most artless of creatures and it has become inwardly a hell of shame, reproaching yourself for irrevocable wrongs done. […]

  • 105 Ibid., 343f.

And now at last you wish to insist on rights, seek, like the rattlesnake charms its prey by its gaze alone, in hinting at claims to bring the deceived one into your presence and your clutches, whereas I have come to the conviction that you wished to make the purest, noblest and most simple- hearted of creatures an object of the most impotent debauchery and that you, depite all your clever talk of good health beyond your years, are, with all your stimulants, incapable of anything else. Fie and for shame at your abominations. Were you to flee to the Indus, what abhorrence, what judgment of depravity would not pursue you from all of Germany and half of Europe, where you are so proud of your celebrity […]105

50One does not wish to quote more, and the letter took an ominous turn when Paulus indicated that he would sue for annulment and for appropriate compensation.

  • 106 KA, XXX, 44-47; ‘in einem kalten, hofmeisternden Tone’, 45.
  • 107 Ibid., 89-91; ‘Unerfahrenheit’, 90.

51At this stage, Schlegel did the only wise thing left to him: he contacted his brother Friedrich, still in Frankfurt. Friedrich, hopeless in financial and other matters, nevertheless had more savoir-vivre than his older brother. The ‘superior tone’ he said,106 had been unfortunate, but the important thing was to restore their relationship, and that could only be done in person, and not through letters. It would need time to heal any wrongs, not mere expressions of affection. True, the mother’s antics might be partly to blame, but he should not have recourse to law. Slightly later, he suggested that Windischmann, Schlegel’s colleague in Bonn, should act as an intermediary; or that there might be a trial period, with Sophie living in Bonn for, say, six months and then deciding. Friedrich also wrote to both mother107 and daughter. To the former, expressing himself delicately, he cited Sophie’s ‘lack of experience’ [‘Unerfahrenheit’].

  • 108 Lambertz also made the same points in a letter to Paulus. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (23 (...)

52By this time it was too late. Paulus was insisting on litigation and was bringing up heavy ordnance in the person of his Heidelberg colleague, the jurist, ‘Professor und Geheimrath’, Karl Salomo Zachariae, to manage his case. It was at this stage that Schlegel turned to Lambertz. To Paulus’s allegations, Schlegel said that he would never have contemplated marriage without taking medical advice; moreover, the marriage settlement had been based on a spoken agreement, not a written contract. Paulus, now showing his true colours, was clearly not above using blackmail to get his hands on Schlegel’s money: either he should agree to an indenture, or there would be a court case with embarrassing revelations.108

  • 109 schändliche Geschichte’, ‘Schlegelsche Sau-Geschichte’. Sulpiz Boisserée, Tagebücher 1808-1854. Im (...)
  • 110 Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, VII, 278.

53The nature of these possible revelations no-one knows. Perhaps it was Schlegel’s impuissance or Sophie’s ‘Unerfahrenheit’, or a mixture of both. Perhaps it was none of these things. Maybe Sophie’s parents extracted from their innocent daughter only what they wished to hear. We shall never know. The parents had achieved what they clearly wanted all along: they did not lose their daughter. It was Paulus and his wife who broadcast the story of Schlegel’s alleged impotence: Jean Paul knew; Sulpiz Boisserée spoke of ‘swinish goings-on’;109 Heinrich Heine later made use of it to cruellest effect. It served to confirm all the unpleasant things that people claimed to know about Schlegel, his insufferable vanity, his pedantry, his superior tone. According to Jean Paul (not a disinterested witness), Sophie had no hatred in her heart for Schlegel, only contempt.110

  • 111 What does the law say?’, ‘Which way shall we proceed?’. Bonn UB, Lambertz 2537, 7-10.
  • 112 Cf. Paulus to both Lambertz and Böcking, December 1845, Briefe, II, 158.

54Fortunately the lawyers were wiser than their clients. They sought ways and means to extricate Schlegel (‘quid juris?’, ‘quo modo?’).111 (There was the further complication of Heidelberg being subject to Baden law and the Prussian Rhineland still recognizing the ‘code civil’). Paulus wanted Schlegel to agree to a voluntary separation, with appropriate financial compensation. Lambertz informed Paulus that he might have to read out his letters in court. Did he really wish to subject his daughter to that? The result was that Schlegel was never legally separated from his wife and that the Paulus family never pressed a claim on his estate. Schlegel refused to have the matter settled, although advised by Lambertz to do so. When Schlegel died in 1845, Lambertz had to write formally to Sophie von Schlegel, as she still was, asking whether she wished to exercise her rights to Schlegel’s estate. Her father believed she should.112 To her credit, she waived them.

  • 113 Heidelberg UB, Heid. Hs. 860, 649.
  • 114 Briefe, I, 357.
  • 115 Cf. Sophie von Schlegel to Carl Winter 26 January, 1819. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (23) (...)
  • 116 The letter is published in Briefe, II, 225f.

55Schlegel nevertheless had the threat of Paulus’s rapacity hanging over him for the rest of his life, not to speak of the scandal that might be involved. Paulus continued to collect further evidence of Schlegel’s alleged turpitude: his papers hold the full documentation of the affair of the painter Peter Busch that was to cause Schlegel heartache in 1841.113 They also contain letters of a different nature, concerning Madame de Staël’s correspondence with Schlegel. In January 1819, when relations with the Paulus family were at their worst, Schlegel made arrangements for Sophie to send the packet of Staël letters to him.114 This clearly did not happen: Sophie held on to them.115 In 1831, when Albertine de Broglie asked him for the return of her mother’s letters, he suggested that she write directly to Sophie, which she did in the politest of terms.116 Circumstantial evidence (there were no further requests) suggests that they were returned, but the trail ends there. Their disappearance, which we must now assume, is one of the great losses of documentary material on Staël and Schlegel.

  • 117 KA, XXX, 250-252.
  • 118 Ibid., 413f.
  • 119 Briefe, I, 355.
  • 120 Ibid., 356.
  • 121 Friedrich v. Oppeln-Bronikowski, David Ferdinand Koreff. Serapionsbruder, Magnetiseur, Geheimrat un (...)
  • 122 SW, I, 379.

56His brother Friedrich, predictably, was deeply upset, even suggesting as late as 1820 that August Wilhelm make another attempt at reconciliation,117 and writing in 1823 of how painful the thought of their separation was.118 Albertine de Broglie was more matter‑of‑fact.119 She feared that he had committed an ‘étourderie’ [act of folly], perhaps that he had really only imagined that he was in love and had come to realize this once he was married. Above all, he should avoid ‘éclat’. There was much to ponder in her words. With a deep sense of inner distress but also of the resignation that he had learned to practise over the years, Schlegel wrote to his superior Altenstein120 that he was despite all willing to remain in Bonn in the hope of adding to the lustre of this new university. In a letter to Koreff he stressed the need to forget the rumours and allegations and put the affair behind him.121 Under the circumstances, it is a wonder that he achieved as much as he did in these Bonn years, for the failed marriage was not the last chagrin that he was to experience. An undated sonnet, ‘Abschied’ [Leave-Taking], though unrelated to these events, expressed not only the drying up of his poetic powers, but also a sense of inner death.122 It may serve as a kind of epitaph to this unhappy episode.

  • 123 It eventually became part of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829).

57Was anyone to blame? A much wiser Goethe had written Der Mann von funfzig Jahren [The Man of Fifty], a story of late passion which ended in renunciation.123 Should Schlegel have been similarly prudent? Should the parents have thought again? Should others have warned him? These are imponderables. As it was, Sophie and Schlegel lived apart for over twenty- five years, she in the enveloping bosom of her parents, he searching hard for other fulfilments of his affections and essentially finding none.

The University of Bonn

58The road from the neighbourhood of the Seven Mountains to Bonn lies through an open country. The view of that flourishing Prussian town, and rising university, was very pleasing. The first buildings that meet the traveller’s eye are the cupola-crowned Academy, which is appropriated by the medical faculty—and the Castle, now devoted to the uses of the University. The town-gate is handsome, the streets lively. If Bonn be inferior to Carlsruhe in beauty, it possesses commercial activity, one of the moral embellishments of a town. Groups of students, sauntering through the streets, or gazing from the windows, diminishes nought from the sprightliness of Bonn.

In the Castle is a gallery of casts, for the use of young artists. Several specimens are copied from pieces in the Louvre, and in the Elgin collection. The College Park, or Court Garden, forms a handsome promenade, communicating by a chestnut-alley with Poppelsdorf, which is situated at the foot of the Kreuzberg, and contains a castle and garden. From the Alte Zoll, a bastion at one end of the park, there is an admirable view of the Rhine, with the Seven Mountains rising dim in the distance, and the hills about Poppelsdorf. The Münster-Kirche, or Cathedral, is a Gothic building. The Jesuits’ Church and College are now deserted, that order being suppressed in the Prussian dominions. The Town-house, which is modern, stands in the market-place.

  • 124 George Downes, Letters from Continental Countries, 2 vols (Dublin: Curry, 1832), II, 130f.

The celebrated Augustus von Schlegel, the friend of Madame de Staël, is now a professor at this university. I had to apply to him for admission to an interesting collection of antiques, not yet arranged for public exhibition.124

We have to trace the course that led Schlegel to come to Bonn in 1818 and become the local celebrity described by an Irish visitor in 1832.

  • 125 See generally Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Preußen und die Rheinlande 1815-1915’, Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätt (...)

59The Prussian Rhine province,125 made up very largely of the former territories of the archbishop-elector of Cologne and the duchies of Jülich, Berg and Cleve, was proclaimed on 5 April, 1815. It was however not simply the result of a transfer from the ancien régime to a victorious Prussia. There had been the short revolutionary interlude from 1797 to 1814 when they were French. Cities and towns of the historic importance of Cologne, Coblenz, Düsseldorf, Aachen or Trier had been rudely shaken out of the restful late eighteenth century into the harsher realities of the nineteenth. Cologne, with the hulk of its unfinished Gothic cathedral, had become the symbol of German past greatness and the need for its revival. Friedrich Schlegel, the Boisserée brothers, Joseph Görres, had lent their voices to these aspirations.

  • 126 The main sources for this section are Christian Renger, Die Gründung und Einrichtung der Universitä (...)

60Now, in 1815, the Rhine provinces, largely Catholic, found themselves ruled by an alien power, largely Protestant. Gestures of benevolence were the order of the day. Conscious that the Revolution and its aftermath had swept away the old Rhenish universities, King Frederick William III of Prussia had in the same proclamation promised the Rhineland a university of its own. There had of course been vague undertakings for Cologne or Düsseldorf under French administration (Friedrich Schlegel had entertained hopes in 1806), but the Prussian promise was not an empty one. These were the background circumstances to Schlegel’s translation from Coppet and Paris to the banks of the Rhine.126

  • 127 CF. Ludwig Petry, ‘Die Gründung der drei Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitäten Berlin, Breslau und Bonn’ (...)

61The principle was laudable, the details less straightforward. During the Napoleonic years—despite their being also the times of the Stein- Hardenberg reforms in Prussia—the universities had suffered badly. Some ancient academies, like Cologne or Mainz, had simply not survived the upheaval, while the medieval University of Heidelberg had emerged effectively as a new institution. After a sustained campaign for its creation, the Prussian education reforms had seen the foundation of Berlin University in 1810, with Breslau in 1811 to satisfy the needs of the province of Silesia. The Rhine provinces were a different proposition. There were several serious contenders; a perceived need too to provide a western university in the gap that extended from the Low Countries to the nearest academies, Heidelberg and Freiburg in the south.127

  • 128 See Max Braubach, Die erste Bonner Hochschule. Maxische Akademie und kurfürstliche Universität 1774 (...)
  • 129 Ueber Kunst und Alterthum, I, i, 36-38.

62Not only that: the new territories contained a total of four former universities. Paderborn and Duisburg could be safely discounted, leaving Cologne and Bonn in the running. Cologne, founded in 1405, might seem to have the edge, especially as a centre of Roman and medieval antiquities. But the short-lived University of Bonn (1786‑98), founded by the last prince-bishop and elector and reflecting the spirit of the late Enlightenment, could by no means be discounted.128 (The young Ludwig van Beethoven had been briefly enrolled there.) Moreover, Bonn’s former archiepiscopal palace, a grand and spacious building in the baroque style, was standing empty. That was more or less the situation when Goethe made his journey to the Rhine and Main in 1814‑15 and remarked of Bonn that its setting for a university was advantageous.129

63In the event, the matter was settled by the royal decree that created the University of Bonn on 8 April, 1818. The crucial decisions that would affect Schlegel had been taken by the Prussian state chancellor, Prince

64Hardenberg, and his minister of education (from 1817), Baron Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein. As Hardenberg’s slightly improbable right-hand man was David Ferdinand Koreff, the ‘Wunderdoktor’ who had cured Schlegel in Vincelles back in 1806. Now, when not magnetizing titled ladies, he had found himself successively responsible for organizing the medical services in the new provinces, then Hardenberg’s personal physician, a professor in Berlin, and finally, from 1815 to 1818, an official in the Prussian state service.

  • 130 Alex. Kaufmann, ‘Zur Erinnerung an August Wilhelm von Schlegel’, Monatsschrift für rheinisch-westfä (...)

65It was not automatic that Schlegel should embark—or re-embark—on an academic career. Philipp Joseph Rehfues, his later superior as ‘Kurator’ of the University of Bonn, reflected that Schlegel, after having been in Bernadotte’s employ, could have made a career in Prussian, Russian or Austrian service; or he might have become an homme de lettres in France, a major contributor to the Journal des débats, perhaps a pair de France, even a minister, like Victor Cousin, also an academic.130 Yet the signs pointed inexorably in the direction of academia.

  • 131 See Oppeln-Bronikowsi, 90.
  • 132 Mélanges d’histoire littéraire par Guillaume Favre avec des lettres inédites d’Auguste- Guillaume S (...)
  • 133 The correspondence between Koreff and AWS in Oppeln-Bronikowski, 225-236, 239, 251-253, 274-276, 32 (...)

66It was Koreff (or so he maintained) who had first conceived the idea of attracting Schlegel to a university post in Prussia.131 He claimed to have written to Schlegel immediately on hearing of Madame de Staël’s death, using Alexander von Humboldt as an intermediary. Wilhelm von Humboldt also asserted that it was his idea. Whichever way, it was clear that the authorities in Berlin wanted Schlegel. Writing on 17 December, 1817 to his friend and colleague Guillaume Favre in Geneva, Schlegel could tell him that he had received a flattering offer of a chair at the University of Berlin. His espoused hope had been the life of private scholar, now in Coppet, now in Geneva, but here was an approach in which he was being asked to state his own terms.132 At first, in Koreff’s private communications133 but also in Altenstein’s official letters, there was only mention of Berlin. A chair would be created to suit his particular accomplishments, ‘literature and aesthetics, German language and literature’ [‘Litteratur und schöne Wissenschaft, deutsche Sprache und Litteratur’]. His Indian studies would not be neglected either; on the contrary, he could take steps to have a Sanskrit typeface created and could travel to Paris or London if necessary. The ideas expressed in the Chézy review of 1815 were clearly going to find fulfilment.

  • 134 Renger (1983), 269.

67His qualifications spoke for themselves. No‑one mentioned that he did not have the ‘Habilitation’ normally required for professorial chairs.134 Nobody specified the grounds for his eminence. His Berlin and Vienna Lectures would have suggested themselves, although they were not strictly academic in form or conception. The corpus of reviews between 1810 and 1816, now augmented by the authoritative Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales (1818) bespoke a scholar of widest competence.

  • 135 Cf. Friedrich von Bezold, Geschichte der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität von der Gründun (...)

68Koreff then sounded a slightly different note. Would Schlegel perhaps consider a year or two at the new University of Bonn? His chair would of course remain linked to Berlin, but his presence on the Rhine would give the new institution some early resplendence. Schlegel was not taken with the idea, citing the advantages, academic and cultural, of the capital city. After the Rhine journey in the early summer of 1818, however, where he saw the new university town for the first time, and, crucially, met the governor of the Rhine province, Count Friedrich zu Solms-Laubach, he seemed not averse to sharing his energies between Berlin and Bonn. The appointment memorandum signed on 20 July indicated this. It suited the thinking, briefly entertained at the time, that Berlin would be the central academic institution in Prussia, surrounded by a group of satellites.135

69Schlegel’s next move put paid to that idea. To Altenstein’s consternation, he announced that he would after all prefer Bonn. The reason for this was Sophie Paulus and his forthcoming marriage, the need to soften the blow of her separation from her parents and the wish to protect her delicate frame from the rigours of the Berlin climate. Koreff and Hardenberg thereupon gave up all hope of securing Schlegel for Berlin, although his appointment to Bonn was not finally ratified until 1822. Bonn had as yet no library to speak of, but he was having his own books sent from Coppet. The small number of students that a new university could command would mean a reduced income from their fees. But Bonn, in attracting scholars like Schlegel, could stand comparison with Berlin and its luminaries, such as Schleiermacher or Hegel, Savigny or Raumer.

  • 136 Karl Th. Schäfer, Verfassungsgeschichte der Universität Bonn 1818 bis 1960. 150 Jahre Rheinische Fr (...)
  • 137 Ibid., 426, 453.

70All this might suggest that Schlegel could expect special favours from the Prussian authorities and that these were also granted. This is only partly true, for all professors were subject to the practical needs of the state and the injunction for its universities to train men who were ‘tüchtig’ that is qualified, proficient and morally sound, for the requirements of the civil administration and church or the private sphere.136 This clearly did not mean ‘pure’ scholarship for its own sake. True, the writings of professors were not subject to censorship; in Bonn, on the other hand, they were required each semester to give one public and free lecture of at least two hours per week.137

  • 138 Schlegel lectured variously on Academic Study, Ancient History (up to Cyrus, up the the Fall of the (...)

71Applied to Schlegel’s career in Bonn, it meant the broad transmission of general knowledge, a kind of studium generale, in classics, history, archaeology, literature, the fine arts, poetics, as we see in the almost universally wide range of lectures that he offered over twenty-five years.138 These lectures were for the already educated, whose knowledge nevertheless stood in need of deepening. Concurrent with this lecture programme was the communication of a specialised knowledge of Sanskrit, pure linguistic science that was to produce a small and highly-trained elite, also ‘tüchtig’, but not of immediate relevance to the pragmatic needs of the state. It was the justification for Schlegel’s claim that his Indian studies were disinterested scholarship, untainted by commerce or territorial gain, and this was largely true. That these unperjured studies were also dependent on the scholarship of a Colebrooke, a Carey, a Wilson, tinged therefore by ‘colonialism’ in its widest sense, was an irony of which he was subliminally aware but which he had no cause to voice too loudly.

The Bonn Professor

  • 139 Oppeln-Bronikowski, 330-334.

72Writing to Koreff on 19 January, 1820, in the first part of a long letter,139 Schlegel dilated upon the advantages of Bonn as a town and a university. To his former physician he could state that he had put behind him the ‘calumniations’ that had accompanied his first arrival. By this he meant the disastrous marriage. Would that he had been able to shake off the memory of that ‘étourderie’ so quickly. For gossip-mongers and critics during his lifetime and writers of memoirs after his death found it a convenient stick with which to beat him while living and to strike him when dead. His reaction is typical of the stoical acceptance of things as they were that we find in the letters to the few genuine confidants left to him in later life.

73Unlike his brother Friedrich, he could not fall back on the consolations of faith: the Protestantism that he claimed increasingly to profess in these Bonn years was really another way of saying ‘non-Catholic’. An awareness of a deep religious instinct in humankind, profounder than any doctrine or cosmogony, that accompanied his philological and historical studies, could offer little stay against life’s real tribulations.

74In his best moments Schlegel was like those old humanist neo-stoics and Latinists for whom Seneca or Lucretius were not mere objects of study, and he was of course very much at home in their scholarly world. Thus Friedrich Tieck’s neo-classically Roman bust that now adorns the Great Hall of Bonn University, best symbolizes Schlegel in these years of muted triumph, not that disdainful and bemedalled portrait painting by Hohneck that has so much become his later image. For if indeed Schlegel at his worst was carping, captious, snide—and his vanity proverbial—at his best he was generous and altruistic: one does well to steer a middle course.

  • 140 Ibid., 332-334.

75Bonn’s climate and setting, Schlegel continued to Koreff,140 its proximity to France, his good standing with his colleagues, the social ease of a small town, the distinguished visitors he had already received, the generosity of the monarch and his ministers, the influx of students to the new university (he was that winter lecturing to two hundred): all this showed that he had made the right choice in not going to Berlin.

Fig. 24 Jahrbuch der Preußischen Rhein-Universität (Bonn, 1819). Frontispiece issued 1821.

Fig. 24 Jahrbuch der Preußischen Rhein-Universität (Bonn, 1819). Frontispiece issued 1821.

© And by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0.

  • 141 Renger (1973), 46.
  • 142 Jahrbuch, 25-33, 279-291, 445-464.
  • 143 On Windischmann see Adolf Dyroff, Carl Jos. Windischmann (1775-1839) und sein Kreis, Görres-Gesells (...)
  • 144 An Windischmann, bei Vermählung seiner Tochter. 1821’. SW, I, 378.
  • 145 Opuscula, 415-420.
  • 146 Bonn Universitätsbibliothek, S 686.
  • 147 Reinhard Kekulé, Das Leben Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker’s (Leipzig : Teubner, 1880), 174, 192. See al (...)

76These same points were being made, but on a much larger scale, by the university’s own publication, Jahrbuch der Preußischen Rhein-Universität, the first number of which Schlegel edited.141 One could see there the results of the recruiting policy initiated by Count Solms-Laubach, now advanced to ‘Kurator’ of the university: also the colleagues with whom Schlegel was most closely associated, and the lectures that they offered.142 Karl Joseph Windischmann,143 Bopp’s teacher at Aschaffenburg and a friend of Friedrich Schlegel, moved between medicine and philosophy. At first, Schlegel was sufficiently close to Windischmann to write a poem for the wedding of one of his daughters,144 but the relationship cooled when August Wilhelm began his attacks on Friedrich. August Ferdinand Naeke taught classics (Schlegel held an oration in his memory),145 Johann Friedrich Ferdinand Delbrück history and philosophy, which did not prevent overlaps between him and Schlegel. Ernst Moritz Arndt, whom Schlegel had met in St Petersburg, now a historian and commentator on the ‘Zeitgeist’, was a disrespectful, querulous and troublesome colleague whose outspokenness soon attracted the attention of the authorities. Of his Bonn colleagues, Schlegel was perhaps closest to the classics scholar Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, who was also for a time in political trouble. Welcker had been tutor to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s children before becoming an academic. Schlegel’s notes to Welcker146 and his general respect for his scholarship—he attended the younger man’s lectures on paleography and inscriptions147—suggested common interests and outlook. (He was less taken with Welcker’s studies on mythology.)

  • 148 Jahrbuch, 61-70; the same effectively by AWS in Latin, Opuscula, 418.

77An anonymous contribution to the Jahrbuch was devoted to the charms and advantages of the town of Bonn itself.148 True, it was small and easily traversed (its population was between nine and ten thousand), but so were Jena, Göttingen and Heidelberg. The town had suffered in wars and conflagrations, and although a Roman foundation, it did not match Cologne’s historic pre-eminence. Then there was the setting on the Rhine, with the Siebengebirge range on its opposite bank, the vineyards, the forests, ‘God’s garden’. And if one wanted excursions, there were romantic hills and promontories within easy reach.

  • 149 Wolfgang Menzel, Denkwürdigkeiten. Herausgegeben von dem Sohne Konrad Menzel (Bielefeld, Leipzig: V (...)
  • 150 vornehme Geselligkeit’. Kekulé, Welcker, 177f.
  • 151 Description in Kaufmann, ‘Auf den Spuren August Wilhelm von Schlegels’, 235.

78This small university town was—for the moment at least—where Schlegel was to settle after thirteen itinerant years. Everybody knew each other, nothing went unnoticed. Would Schlegel’s foibles and petty extravagances have been registered in Paris or even Berlin? Would for instance anyone there have stopped to look, as they did in Bonn, when he overbalanced while admiring a pretty face?149 (In Berlin perhaps: Theodor Fontane deplored the Berliners’ nosiness.) Would the relative opulence of his establishment in Sandkaule 529 have been otherwise noteworthy? But in Bonn this was the house in which he was to live in grand style,150 grander than a professor needed to—with just a hint of competition, not with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s seat of Tegel near Berlin, but certainly with Goethe’s house on the Frauenplan in Weimar—and which he was to stuff with his treasures,151 his Indian miniatures and bronzes (not to everyone’s taste), presided over by the ever-loyal housekeeper Marie Löbel, with Heinrich von Wehrden, a coachman and factotum, in addition. This is where he was to receive a stream of visitors—the Broglies, Ludwig Tieck, Adam Mickiewicz, David d’Angers, Sir James Mackintosh, to mention some of the more prominent—but where he would also take in his niece Auguste von Buttlar and those honorary nephews, John Colebrooke and Patrick Johnston.

79His life was to be ruled by the events of the new university and its institutions (some still to be created), its visitations, the absorbing minutiae and trivia of senate and faculty, by the rhythm of his lecturing. He would play his part in improving the town and its amenities. It was essentially here that his Sanskrit studies, which brought him new eminence, were to be carried out. Others, ‘from Edinburgh to Cadiz’ might translate and adapt his Vienna Lectures, while the torch of the Shakespeare translation was to be entrusted to the unsteady hands of Ludwig Tieck. Yet paradoxically it was those very Sanskrit studies, to be pursued to the standards of the German philological tradition that provided him with a link to the ‘monde’, that greater outside world centred in Paris and London. They linked him ultimately, too, with the even wider ‘monde’ of India itself, not in real terms of course, but through those who had actually been there, members of the Royal Asiatic Society in London or the Asiatic Society in Calcutta; they were the surrogate for that passage to India which he never made, the one from which his older brother Carl, all those years ago, had never returned. These studies—not in the first instance the Staël‑Broglie connection or the former circle of Madame de Staël in England—were the primary reason for those two visits each to Paris and London.

  • 152 Jahrbuch, 94-98.
  • 153 The collection had been auctioned in 1817. Dietrich Höroldt (ed.), Bonn. Von einer französischen Be (...)

80There were two further articles in the Jahrbuch, this time by Schlegel himself and an indication of the standing that he already enjoyed. Each could be seen as a statement of intent on behalf of Bonn and its university. There was his description of the collection left by canon Franz Pick, dated ‘February, 1819’.152 No-one seemed better qualified to pronounce on it than Schlegel: one ancient Roman head, he claimed, was better than anything he had seen in Rome, Florence or Paris. The ancient coins, but also the stained glass, the paintings and the manuscripts (including a Carolingian item) all spoke for their retention in Bonn. In the event the university only purchased the coin collection.153

  • 154 Jahrbuch, 224-250.
  • 155 Indische Bibliothek. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm von Schlegel, 2 vols (Bonn : Weber, 1820, (...)
  • 156 Wilhelm Erman, Geschichte der Bonner Universitätsbibliothek (1818-1901), Sammlung bibliothekswissen (...)
  • 157 Jahrbuch, 226f.

81The longer of the two articles by Schlegel had more significance for the future: Ueber den gegenwärtigen Zustand der Indischen Philologie [On the Present State of Indian Philology].154 It had all the authority of a programmatic statement: it was to introduce his Indische Bibliothek in 1820, and it was translated into French.155 ‘Philologie’ was the operative word here, for it was the generally accepted term for ‘classics’, Greek and Latin, as used in the lecture lists of universities. It underlined one of the key points that he was to make: the same standards as applied to the study of classical texts, as had motivated Heyne or Friedrich August Wolf, the same rigour in choosing versions, the same vigilance over manuscripts, the same acumen in determining meaning, must apply to the study of Sanskrit. It was Heyne or Friedrich August Wolf in a different context. It was a point that he had made in 1815; it was also the basis of Franz Bopp’s studies (although Schlegel did not press the point). Now, in 1819, he knew much more Sanskrit; he was acquainted with the manuscript situation, the textual and lexical position. He had assembled at considerable expense his own collection of texts and commentaries, making it at first unnecessary for the university library to duplicate it.156 He knew what he wanted: professionally produced editions (there would be the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Râmâyana and Hitopadeśa). He would have to have a press made with devanagari type. ‘Philology’ in its widest sense also took in comparative linguistics and ethnology, ancient history, and philosophy, what in effect Friedrich Schlegel had introduced into European oriental studies.157

  • 158 AWS gave such a lecture, but under the rubric of History, in the summer semester of 1819. Ibid., 28 (...)

82While Schlegel, as said, could not afford to be dismissive of the British role in all this, he was not overawed either. He was duly appreciative of the work of Colebrooke, Wilkins and Carey, as indeed he must be, yet the British approach had of necessity to be defined by administration, law, and commerce. Even the great Sir William Jones, fine scholar as he was, a savant in his own right, had been a judge in British India. The French, too, spurred on by Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, had begun to take a keener interest in inscriptions and monuments. But German universities could bring their particular, if not unique, skills to bear on this most ancient culture and language. Where else but in Germany, and in Bonn, would a general lecture on Indian antiquities and literature be on offer and who else could deliver it but Schlegel?158

The Carlsbad Decrees

  • 159 [Alexander Stourdza], Mémoire sur l’état actuel de l’Allemagne. Par M. de S…, conseiller d’état de (...)
  • 160 Renger (1973), 50f.

83All of these positive points were registered in the first half of Schlegel’s letter to Koreff. The second part, alas, took them all back. It seemed that Schlegel imagined himself enjoying an academic idyll amid vineyards and boskiness, where he could put together the pieces of his existence, recently so rudely shattered. It was not to be. Even as he was negotiating with the Prussian authorities about coming to Bonn, the Congress of Aachen had received a memorandum from the Tsar’s representative and counsel of state, Alexander Stourdza, Mémoire sur l’état actuel de l’Allemagne [Memorandum on the Present State of Germany]. The Tsar, his head already turned by the ministrations of Frau von Krüdener and her Holy Alliance, was with Metternich’s acquiescence extending his long arm into German university affairs. The universities, this pamphlet averred, were repositories of ‘all the errors of the century’, hotbeds of ‘academic freedom’; it was time to suppress their privileges and police their conduct.159 Already on 11 January, 1819, a ‘Reskript’ from the Prussian authorities ordered professors under their jurisdiction to refrain from political journalism.160 Schlegel’s days as a political pamphleteer were well and truly past, but this directive was primarily meant for Ernst Moritz Arndt in Bonn, the last volume of whose Geist der Zeit [Spirit of the Age] had displeased the king. All this had caused consternation in Bonn. Then, on 23 March, 1819, August von Kotzebue was murdered in Mannheim by the Jena student Karl Sand. Universities again: first there had been the—in every sense—fiery proclamations on the Wartburg in 1817, where Kotzebue’s works had been publicly burned, and now this.

  • 161 A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on German Literature from Gottsched to Goethe Given at the University of (...)
  • 162 ‘un mauvais sujet, et le voilà martyre’. Krisenjahre, II, 335.
  • 163 163 Jahrbuch, 463. The Index praelectionum for the same year has ‘Lectiones suas iusto tempore cont (...)
  • 164 Kekulé, 160-163, 170; Köhnken, 59f.
  • 165 Krisenjahre, II, 339.
  • 166 On Rehfues see Karl Th. Schäfer, Verfassungsgeschichte der Universität Bonn, appendix by Gottfried (...)
  • 167 Schäfer, 23.
  • 168 To Altenstein, Briefe, I, 362, to Schulze, 367-369.
  • 169 Krisenjahre, II, 347f.

84Rejoicing would have been tasteless, but there was no mourning for Kotzebue in former Romantic circles. Schlegel never retracted his anti- Kotzebue parody Ehrenpforte [Triumphal Arch] of 1800; he told his students in 1833 that Kotzebue’s material was a ‘slippery moral, whitewashed with magnanimity’.161 For all that, it was, as he wrote to Auguste de Staël, a ‘deplorable catastrophe’, given that Kotzebue, already a dubious character (a Russian police spy as well as a dramatist), was now being seen as a martyr.162 Sympathising with Sand or his family did not pay either: the Berlin theologian Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette was summarily dismissed for doing just that. In Bonn, the Prussian authorities took steps to suppress any activity seen as inimical to the state. On 15 July, Friedrich Welcker, his brother, and Arndt received a visitation from the Prussian ministry of police, backed up by a battalion of infantry, had their rooms ransacked and their papers confiscated. Charges of sedition were preferred against all three: Arndt was suspended (the Jahrbuch, announcing the lectures for the summer of 1821, stated discreetly that he would ‘notify the recommencement of his lectures in due course’),163 and not reinstated until 1840. Welcker, an outspoken upholder of political rights, remained in office, but did not receive an explanation until 1822 and an acquittal until 1825.164 All this was followed by the so-called Carlsbad Decrees of 20 September, 1819, whose implementation in Prussia was to lead to reaction and repression in the universities. To their credit, the Bonn professors, Schlegel among them, protested against this flouting of due process.165 Not only that: in a series of agitated letters, to Auguste, to Altenstein, to Johannes Schulze, a high official in the ministry of education, Schlegel expressed his disillusionment. An added factor was that Count Solms, who was generally well-liked, had been replaced by a new ‘Kurator’, who seemed less benign, Philipp Joseph (later ‘von’) Rehfues.166 The Carlsbad Decrees also involved the temporary suspension of professors’ exemption from censorship.167On 7 December, Schlegel actually tendered his resignation.168 Albertine de Broglie offered him a safe haven in Coppet; to Auguste, too, he expressed the thought of returning to Switzerland, perhaps to Geneva.169

  • 170 Briefe, I, 369-371.
  • 171 Ibid., 371f.
  • 172 Ibid., 372f.
  • 173 Ibid., 373-377.
  • 174 Ibid., 377.
  • 175 die bedeutendsten Aufschlüsse für die Bildungs-Geschichte der Menschheit im Allgemeinen aus der Wi (...)
  • 176 Mainly in Bonn, Universitätsbibliothek, S 1392.

85In the event, nothing came of these rumours of departure. The Prussian ministry—Altenstein, Schulze, Koreff, even the state chancellor Hardenberg himself—were not going to let this academic prize slip from their grasp over a few mere inconveniences. They used flattery and blandishments, Schulze indicating that Altenstein would accede to any reasonable request;170 to Hardenberg himself Schlegel wrote that a ‘nod from Your Serene Highness’ was what was keeping him in Bonn.171 Schlegel was not long in stating his terms. To Schulze he set out his plans for Indian studies and the need for a visit to Paris, his intention of conducting etymological researches and then of publishing Sanskrit texts.172 In a long letter to Altenstein,173 with the appendix, ‘On the Means of Thoroughly Establishing the Study of the Indian Language in Germany’, he was more specific, giving a historical conspectus (not omitting his brother Friedrich), then a set of desiderata: an Indian letterpress, editions of basic elementary texts. Knowing the man with whom he was dealing, Schlegel emphasized that Sanskrit had hitherto only been studied in Paris or London. Now it was to be Germany’s turn, and to the ‘renown of a royal Prussian regional university’.174 That worked. A letter from Hardenberg himself, of 25 March 1820, effectively granted him everything he wanted, not least six months’ leave in Paris and 2,000 talers to help set up the letterpress. The chancellor’s envoi was pure Herder, and caught the tone of the late eighteenth century’s fascination with India: he hoped for ‘awarenesses of the highest importance for the history of human progress from the cradle of culture’.175 Schlegel was to bring that enthusiasm into the nineteenth and give it an academic foundation that the previous century had lacked. Rehfues, as it turned out, proved to be much more sympathetic to Schlegel than originally feared; Schlegel’s correspondence with him is largely official, but it also records private invitations and even the receipt of asparagus.176

  • 177 On all these matters see Roger Paulin, Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom, Inaugural L (...)
  • 178 Ante omnia, cives, legibus est obtemperandum’. ‘Oratio cum rectoris in universitate litteraria Bon (...)

86It cannot be said that Schlegel’s manoeuvrings were conducted in the spirit of pure academic freedom. He was not ignorant of the position of a professor in the educational organisation of the state or of the arrangement, the pact, between the state and its servants. He knew that academics, in the final analysis, could not say or do exactly as they pleased. Fichte in Jena all those years ago had exemplified this, and his case been compounded more recently by another Jena professor, Lorenz Oken, for whose dismissal the Carlsbad Decrees had been invoked. While Schlegel was right to be appalled at the authorities’ treatment of Welcker and Arndt, he was naïve if he believed academics to be immune to such interventions. The case of the ‘Göttingen Seven’ in 1837 would show that so-called academic freedom was still dependent on the whim of a local ruler.177 Two of his own three Latin orations as rector of the University of Bonn, in 1824 and 1825, were to stress obedience to the law, not rocking the boat (with words in season for student corporations, which the Prussian authorities had banned).178 He had wanted a quiet life, hoping to retreat, as he had done in Coppet, when things became too turbulent. Now, he was a public persona.

  • 179 Cf. the memorandum of the Faculty of Philosophy of 16 July, 1822, to this effect. ‘Personalakte der (...)
  • 180 These in letters to Rehfues, in chronological order of mention. Bonn Universitäts bibliothek, S 139 (...)

87It is clear from all this that the University of Bonn knew what an acquisition Schlegel was and was prepared to make accommodations on his behalf. He was one of the few professors with a noble title: it gave the university a certain cachet. His permanent appointment as a professor in 1822 was in one sense a mere formality, but it was also seen as a great honour.179 Even by then he was beginning to fulfil his promise to Altenstein of putting Bonn on the map with his Sanskrit studies. He was not above reminding Rehfues the ‘Kurator’ subsequently of what he had achieved in respect of older literatures, Shakespeare, and Sanskrit (which he had had to learn the ‘hard way’, he said, not with help from Indians, like Wilkins); he cited his honours and decorations; he quoted letters from Henry Brougham and Sir James Mackintosh, where his agreeing to lecture in London would be regarded as an ‘unspeakable obligation’.180 The implication was that few if any other persons in Bonn were similarly obliged, Niebuhr perhaps, but Schlegel would not wish to press that particular analogy.

  • 181 As, for instance, Bezold, 239-246 ; Erich Rothacker, ‘Berühmte Bonner Professoren’, Kriegsvorträge (...)
  • 182 Cf. Bisset Hawkins, Germany; the Spirit of her History, Literature, Social Condition, and National (...)

88This needs stressing, in view of the prevailingly disrespectful and malicious tone of German memoirs of Schlegel in Bonn (Dorow, Menzel, Heine, David Friedrich Strauss), the personal dislike shown him by Niebuhr and Arndt, and the feeling expressed in official or semi-official histories of the university that Schlegel was ‘past his best’.181 It was, as we saw, not a view shared in France or in England, where he was the ‘first critic of modern times’.182

The Professor’s Day

  • 183 Krisenjahre, II, 380.
  • 184 Vorlesungen über Encyclopädie [1803]. Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen [KAV], III, ed. Frank Jolle (...)
  • 185 Indische Bibliothek, II, 466.
  • 186 Oeuvres, III, 245.
  • 187 Briefe, I, 605; ‘Meine liebe Marie’—‘Werthester Herr Professor’. Briefwechsel zwischen August Wilhe (...)

89Schlegel’s day had always had a full twenty-four hours (he told Auguste de Staël in 1821 that he needed forty‑eight).183 For the last thirteen years before coming to Bonn, his life had of course been ordered by Madame de Staël. The exacting regimen dividing the day neatly into sections, noted in 1817 by George Ticknor, the strict separation of work and leisure, had been his method of accommodating both scholarly needs and social commitments. In Bonn, the Staëlian organizing genius was no longer there, and with his life as a professor and international scholar, the calls on his time and energy were correspondingly greater. Back in 1803, at a time of emotional turmoil, he had written of the ideal contemplative life of ‘philosophical asceticism’, achieved by keeping the mind and soul free of earthly cares, passions and amusements, cultivating moderation, cleanliness, order, and silence.184 By 1820 or 1830, this had become more a kind of resigned stoicism. Yet his day, with its set course laid down, had echoes of a kind of Brahmanic ritual, not in any detail of course, and without any kind of religious foundation except the achievement of some kind of inner tranquillity; the desire, as he set it out in 1827, to act as teacher, counsellor, a kind of secular priest of scholarship and learning.185 He admired Brahmanic ‘impassivity’ in controversy and ‘their wise maxims’,186 if not always heeding this wisdom himself. His personal neatness and fastidiousness (his frequent baths)187 could therefore not be put down solely to vanity, but were part of the persona of the scholar-ascetic.

  • 188 Ibid.

90Others, closer to earthly matters, enabled this scholarly existence to function smoothly. Maria Löbel was his housekeeper until her death in 1843. He relied on her implicitly, and there developed between them a kind of affection, separated of course by status and natural deference. At her death, he mourned her like a member of his family. She coped with the running of this huge house, the many visitors, the generous hospitality he extended. The letters they exchanged during his absences from Bonn form a kind of domestic counterbalance to the Broglie correspondence, behind which are similarly unseen persons who minister and wait.188 The much younger Heinrich von Wehrden looked after the stable and also doubled as a domestic servant.

  • 189 Briefe, I, 379.

91Was it he who brought Schlegel his candles at five in the morning (or earlier),189 so that his master could work in bed? No wonder that Schlegel complained of eyesight problems (not helped by consulting an incompetent oculist in Paris in 1820 or reading Sanskrit manuscripts in various states of legibility). The candles on the lectern when he lectured in the university were not, as Heine was maliciously to maintain, part of an elaborate ritual of self-promotion, but a simple aid to reading.

  • 190 Höroldt, 97.

92It was in these early hours, as well as late in the evening, that Schlegel found the time for reading, for writing lectures, for attending to the various calls on his time and attention, references for colleagues or young hopefuls (who inundated him with verse or translations), drafts on academic matters, and letters, letters, letters. As he became more and more a part of the local scene in Bonn, there would be city matters (he was elected to the town’s ‘Society for Extension and Improvement’)190 or fund-raising for a Beethoven monument.

Fig. 25 ‘Aula’. Illustration from Die rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn (Bonn, 1839).

Fig. 25 ‘Aula’. Illustration from Die rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn (Bonn, 1839).

Image in the public domain.

  • 191 Opuscula, 360-379, 380-385, 385-396. See Neuhausen, ‘August Wihelm Schlegel in Bonn’.
  • 192 Opuscula, 397-399.
  • 193 Faustam navigationem regis augustissimi et potentissimi Frederici Guilemi III. Quum universo popul (...)
  • 194 The first poem may well be Coleridge’s ‘Youth and Age’ (1823). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor (...)

93Six years into his professorship and only two after being finally confirmed in office, he found himself ‘Rector magnificus’ of the university for the academic year 1824‑25. The university’s language for official occasions and pronouncements was Latin, and in Schlegel they had not only a conscientious rector but also one who was a Latinist. This of course he had always been— De geographia Homerica and even the lecture on Antiquitates Etruscae of 1822 bore witness—but the full unfolding of his Latin rhetorical style came only with his rectorial orations of 1824‑25,191 not least that one of 1825 in which he seized on the conceit of Ulysses to recount his wanderings on the face of the earth as a fugitive from Napoleon and—post-Carlsbad—exhorted his young hearers (but perhaps also older ones like Arndt or Welcker) to avoid political extremes. With all this Schlegel also found himself the university’s public orator, delivering Latin tributes to the living and the dead (as to his former Göttingen teacher Johann Friedrich Blumenbach when the university honoured him on his seventy-fifth birthday),192 for doctoral ceremonies, panegyrics (for his deceased colleague Naeke in 1839). When the king visited Bonn in 1825 and astounded the local populace by making his advent in a steamboat, it was Schlegel who delivered the carmen.193 For who else combined metrical correctness in Latin with the inventiveness, the tropes and the mythology that the occasion elicited? To Coleridge may go the honour (just) of the first poem about a steamship, and Turner may have exploited in more spectacular fashion the effects of smoke, sky and water,194 but Schlegel is surely the first (and doubtless the last) to have essayed it in Latin.

  • 195 Emil Sulger-Gebing, Die Brüder A. W. und F. Schlegel in ihrem Verhältnisse zur bildenden Kunst, For (...)
  • 196 On this subject see Sulger-Gebing, 187-189; Heinrich Schrörs, Die Bonner Universitätsaula und ihre (...)
  • 197 The figures are explained by Schrörs, 50-62 and illustrated in Ilse Riemer, Bildchronik der Bonner (...)

94His opinion was solicited in matters to do with art or archaeology. He was sent to Cologne to assess the authenticity of a painting by a minor seventeenth‑century master.195 The Great Hall of the university, in the former archiepiscopal palace, was bare and uninviting. It was to be enlivened with frescoes.196 He knew from first hand all of the great Italian models; he believed the Germans, unlike the French, to be the true heirs of Renaissance fresco technique. And so it was the painters of the Düsseldorf school who decorated these walls with figures, allegorical and historical, of the four Faculties. He encouraged them to work according to the best authenticated images. Not everyone was enamoured: where Luther or Schleiermacher sat among the tiaras, mitres and tonsures of Theology; Manu and Solon expounded Law with Bacon and Grotius; Galen and Hippocrates dealt out Medicine with Haller and Linné; while Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller represented Philosophy (nor has posterity much mourned the frescoes’ loss).197

  • 198 Anschlag für auswärtige Besucher am Schwarzen Brett des Königlichen Museums vaterländischer Altert (...)
  • 199 For a contemporary account of its setting up and of the works on display see F. G. Welcker, Das aka (...)

95Similarly, Schlegel was very much to the fore in the setting up of both the Rhenish Museum of Antiquities, into which much of the Pick collection had been absorbed, and the university’s own academic museum. In the first-named institution a notice in Schlegel’s hand invited visitors to apply to him in person for an entrance ticket.198 A duty on his first visit to Paris had been to order casts of the most significant antique works of statuary, for inclusion in this institution, not least those of the Parthenon frieze.199

  • 200 Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm von Humboldt und August Wilhelm Schlegel, ed. Albert Leitzmann (Halle (...)
  • 201 Opuscula, 394.
  • 202 Fast täglich durchfliege ich die schöne Umgegend auf edlen und muthigen Rossen.’ Ludwig Tieck und (...)
  • 203 Höroldt, 177.
  • 204 Ibid., 59.
  • 205 Kaufmann (1933), 235.
  • 206 Werner Deetjen, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel in Bonn’, Spenden aus der Weimarer Bibliothek, 15, Zeitsch (...)
  • 207 Schlegel since 1818. Adolf Dyroff, Festschrift zur Feier des 150jährigen Bestehens der Lese- und Er (...)
  • 208 Georg Christian Burchardi, Lebenserinnerungen eines Schleswig-Holsteiners, ed. Wilhelm Klüver, Büch (...)
  • 209 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (17), 26.
  • 210 Ibid. (29), 45.

96Schlegel’s lectures now represented a major incursion, sometimes up to three in one day.200 They were usually at six o’clock in the evening. Schlegel might go riding (as rector he encouraged his hearers to do so),201 or go out in his carriage (with Wehrden as coachman) to take the air.202 Bonn was generally noted for its gregariousness and sociability,203 so perhaps he made calls: on the industrialist Friedrich aus’m Weerth, with his house full of art treasures,204 on the city councillor Nikolaus Forstheim and his attractive wife, for instance;205 later the Flotow family, with whom he exchanged verses; certainly he was renowned for his ‘Mittagsgesellschaften’ [lunch parties] and ‘Abendgesellschaften’ [dinner parties] (and his cuisine).206 Perhaps he caught up with the foreign newspapers in the reading and dining club, ‘Lese- und Erholungs-Gesellschaft’ of which he and most other Bonn professors were members.207 He could call in at the chess club which he founded and that met once a week.208 There could be visitors: Niebuhr’s boy, coming over on an errand, would be shown some of the treasures,209 perhaps the peacock in the garden.210

  • 211 An illustration in Czapla/Schankweiler, between pp. 108 and 109 [plate 2].
  • 212 ich besitze selbst eine kleine Sammlung von Idolen’. Indische Bibliothek, II, 43.

97But guests in the evening would arrive at the plain front of the Sandkaule, with its three storeys, a carriage entrance with archway, five windows on the ground floor and seven on each of the two upper levels.211 The full panoply would unfold once one was inside, the Chinese and Indian rooms on the ground floor, with Chinese wall coverings, tablecloths and stone figures, Indian coloured engravings and bronzes, ‘idols’ (Schlegel’s word),212 a collection assembled mainly in Paris and London, a clock with elephants, Friedrich Tieck’s marble bust of Schlegel himself. Furniture, china, glass and cellar were of the highest quality: they were, after all, intended for the professor’s wife who never joined him.

98The day would end with his withdrawal to the much less grand living quarters upstairs, to the solitude of scholarship.

Teacher and Taught

  • 213 ‘Neigung zu mündlichen Vorträgen’. Leitzmann, 102.

99Schlegel’s career as a lecturer may have reached its high point in Vienna. If it did not scale new heights in Bonn, it achieved a breadth and scope unattained elsewhere. True, he still enjoyed the rhetorical gesture to a larger audience and took an almost homiletical pleasure in the spoken word.213 It was his father Johann Adolf’s legacy, but secularized. His father, too, had taught his own sons (the gifted ones, that is) and catechised others’, had pointed from the pulpit to universal truths. Schlegel, similarly, took seriously his role as an academic teacher and mentor. There was something of ‘pädagogischer Eros’, by which German denotes the desire to reach out and impart knowledge to the young.

  • 214 Indische Bibliothek, II, 17.
  • 215 Krisenjahre, II, 409.
  • 216 Abriß vom Studium der classischen Philologie’. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, IV (4). See Josef (...)
  • 217 Ibid., 427.
  • 218 Indische Bibliothek, I, 277-294.

100Thus what one could call his educational experiments with others’ children, with Auguste Böhmer, the Staëls, his interest in Pestalozzi, his watchful eye over the artistic career of his niece Auguste von Buttlar, the avuncular care for the Colebrooke and Johnston boys, even his ministrations to the Broglie son—not to speak of his later solicitude for those problem nephews Johann August Adolph and Hermann Wolper—were an outpouring of genuine affection for the young but were also motivated by the principles on which he was brought up and which he continued to maintain throughout his academic career. Childhood—he quoted the opening of the Hitopadeśa in his Indische Bibliothek in 1827—is the time of susceptibility to all impressions, like clay that can be formed to any shape, and when hardened, preserves these.214 That was the theory. ‘Languages and mathematics are the basis of all the rest’, he told Auguste de Staël.215 This principle he set out later in a systematic memorandum which has Latin as the foundation of all humanist, historical and philological endeavour,216 his defence of Latin as an academic language and a means of international communication.217 It was the basis of his De studio etymologico that appeared in the Indische Bibliothek in 1820.218 This involved the training of the memory as the means to acquire structures and patterns and the ability to analyse, the basic tools of the philologist and the historian which Schlegel in Bonn now essentially was.

101He had not had the chance to experiment with children of his own; he had no gifted daughter like his Göttingen teacher Schlözer or even his friend Ludwig Tieck. He had failed with Albert de Staël (as all had) — except perhaps in those Rousseau-like ‘promenades’ through Switzerland in 1806. He was unable to see the English boys’ education through to its final fruition.

  • 219 These are: ‘Vorlesungen über das akademische Studium’ (first 1819-20), published as: Vorlesungen üb (...)

102The great cycles of Jena, Berlin and Vienna stood him in good stead for lecturing in Bonn, but only to some degree. In Jena, he had attempted too much and had extended himself too far; in Berlin, the grand schemes of art and literature had failed to cohere and were fragmented; in Vienna, the subdivision into Ancient and Modern was not without its forced character. Nevertheless it is possible to discern links with his Bonn lectures—inasmuch as we have them, for of the over thirty sets of lectures given in various guises and permutations, only seven of his scripts have survived.219 Even then, with the sole and significant exception of his lectures on Sanskrit and Indian literature, which (Bopp in Berlin notwithstanding) represent an innovation for the whole of the German university system, it may well be that Schlegel was relying on earlier drafts: the lectures on Propertius which Karl Marx heard are possibly a revision of the Jena cycle on the Roman elegiacs; the lectures on classical or German metrics were so much second nature as perhaps not even to require a text; those on ancient history are linked with his Göttingen origins, Heyne, Schlözer, Blumenbach, and are by the author of De geographia Homerica, now attained to maturity. He had enough material from Berlin and Vienna to lecture on Romance literatures, on German poetry likewise. The important general lectures on academic study reflected earlier views on the origins of language, on the acquisition of knowledge, on the structure and subdivisions of ‘science’; they echoed, too, Hardenberg’s and Humboldt’s notions of the university and its stated purpose, stressing as well the old humanist ‘nosce te ipsum’ [know thyself]. The lectures on the fine arts had first been drafted in the early Berlin cycle, were partly published in Prometheus in 1808, and were to form the basis of the only public series that he gave in later life outside of the university, those in Berlin in 1827.

103Much of what has survived therefore is very largely in note form or draft, aides‑mémoire for public speaking. There are indications of adjustments or verbal qualifications that he made as he went along. With the exception of those 1827 lectures on the fine arts they were not destined to have an immediate afterlife except in the minds and memories of his student hearers. Their exclusion from the standard edition of his works means that we as readers are deprived of a substantial part of his later intellectual output. Thus it is all the more unfortunate that Heine’s or Menzel’s memoirs are almost entirely malicious, while Marx said nothing about his experience of Schlegel. All the more important are those letters and testimonies to their ‘revered teacher’ from the Sanskritists and philologists who had sat at his feet and whom he trained.

  • 220 Menzel, 137; Wilhelm Dorow, Erlebtes, 4 vols (Leipzig: Hinrichsen, 1843-45), III, 270.
  • 221 Vorlesungen über das akademische Studium, 61.

104It is true that his lecturing style tended towards the ‘occasion’ or the ceremonial (if not exactly as Heine described it), and doubtless there were witty asides (but not necessarily the salacious remarks recorded by Dorow and Menzel).220 Yet one cannot overlook his own stated requirement for the lecturer: that there should be a sympathetic bond between an attentive audience and the teacher.221 The Englishman George Toynbee’s notes from 1833 are therefore all the more important as coming from someone less encumbered with parti pris:

  • 222 Toynbee, 9f. On Toynbee see Gustav Hübener, ‘Ein Engländer über Bonn vor hundert Jahren’, Bonner Mi (...)

A gentleman told me the other day to be sure and call on him as he would feel flattered by having an Englishman to attend his lectures, and he liked to hear himself talk English. Schlegel was first known by his critical writings and his lectures on Dramatic Literature. Then appeared his great work, a translation of Shakespeare. He is now about 65 and occupies himself principally with oriental literature. His lecture today was interesting from the situation of the author. When a man gives us the history of literature he gives us in some measure the history of himself. Schlegel’s appearance is not imposing, his stature is rather low, there is at first sight a look of obeseness and infirmity about him, which however is quickly destroyed as his eye brightens and sheds (as one may say) acute glances into the subject before him. His delivery is clear, distinct, melodious. In hearing this purely literary lecture the students present the same earnestness and attention. They all take copious notes. The utmost silence prevails. No one enters after the lecture has commenced. When it terminates, they sit still until the Lecturer has left the Hall[…]222

  • 223 Franz Bosbach, ‘Einleitung—Fürstliche Studienplanung und Studiengestaltung’, in: FB (ed.), Die Stud (...)
  • 224 Otto Ribbeck, Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philologie, 2 vols (Leipzig (...)

105It was a general principle in nineteenth-century German universities that professors could step over the strict bounds of their subjects and lecture in other related areas. Karl Windischmann in Bonn was an extreme example, being a professor in two faculties; but historians and philosophers lecturing on aesthetics or the history of literature were not uncommon, witness the cases elsewhere of Hegel, Gervinus or Hettner; Karl Lachmann in Berlin was a classical scholar who also edited German medieval texts. Schlegel’s own pupil Lassen read on English literature as well as Sanskrit in the 1840s, indeed Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was recommended to attend his lectures.223 In Bonn at least, it seemed not uncommon for professors to listen to their own colleagues, as Schlegel did for Welcker and possibly later for Friedrich Ritschl;224 Arndt, surprisingly, sat in on one or two of Schlegel’s lectures.

  • 225 Leitzmann, 110.

106Even so, Schlegel’s lecturing range was extraordinary, not of course for anyone who had followed his intellectual career and noted his authority in so many fields of endeavour. Wilhelm von Humboldt, writing to him in 1822, summed it up: ‘a man of your mind, with such many-sided command of scholarship and a marked penchant for philosophy and poetry, should not restrict himself to the philological study of one sole language’.225 By all means teach Sanskrit, but not exclusively.

  • 226 See Gertrud Richert, Die Anfänge der romanischen Philologie und die deutsche Romantik, Beiträge zur (...)

107It was natural that he should wish to lecture on German literature, sometimes just on the ‘Lied der Nibelungen’ alone. ‘Germanistik’ as an academic subject was in its infancy and nobody could claim to know the material better than he, indeed he had helped to shape its recent development. As the translator of Shakespeare, Dante and Calderón and much else besides, he could cover all of modern European literature until Friedrich Christian Diez gained a full chair of Romance studies in 1830 and effectively founded the academic subject. Schlegel had produced in 1818 the first important critique of François Just Marie Raynouard’s edition of the Troubadours, Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales [Observations on Provençcal Language and Literature], but had not pursued the subject further. It had also been one of the first instances of an association between a French and a German scholar on a subject in Romance literature, soon to be augmented by his close relationship with Claude-Charles Fauriel.226 Who better than a practising poet (if no longer writing in a serious vein) to expound metrics and prosody, classical or modern, especially when there were several budding poets in the audience, one destined to be great (Heine) and others to be minor (Geibel, Karl Simrock, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Nikolaus Becker). ‘Theory and History of the Fine Arts’ would be second nature to someone who had seen all that was to be seen in Italy and France and who both revered and criticised Winckelmann. Once Eduard d’Alton, connoisseur and collector, received a full professorship of art in 1827, Schlegel left the field to him, only to return after D’Alton’s death, when he was no more at the height of his powers. The same happened when August Ferdinand Naeke died in 1838 and Schlegel reasserted his right to lecture on classics. Ancient or Roman history he clearly was not going to leave to Welcker or Naeke or indeed to the historian Karl Dietrich Hüllmann, certainly not to Niebuhr, when in 1823 that scholar decided to settle privately in Bonn and finish the third volume of his Roman History, the first two of which Schlegel had savaged. His public lectures on Ancient History would enable him to draw on all the resources of language, history, geography, ethnography, and give a universal conspectus of human civilization. Similarly, no other professor could command the range of competence and experience that went into his public cycle on Academic Study.

  • 227 Leitzmann, 61f., 110. ‘Pourvu qu’ils aient du talent et de la persévérance’. Oeuvres, III, 239.
  • 228 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, LIV, LV.

108Schlegel only occasionally lectured to a public audience on Indian literature and antiquities, but every semester he taught Sanskrit grammar, unspectacularly, unrelentingly, to the small group who had both the enthusiasm and the staying-power, hard going, making his students copy down from his dictation.227 The ‘Grammatica Sanscrita’ in his papers and the comparative grammar of Greek, Latin, Etruscan, Germanic there,228 are part of the philological apparatus that merged teaching and research into one process. For if Schlegel’s other lectures in Bonn could be seen as drawing on resources long since acquired and no longer in the forefront of his academic interests, his Sanskrit studies demonstrated in exemplary fashion that Humboldtian ideal, so rarely attained, where the university teacher and the researcher were one and the same person.

Fig. 26 ‘Inskriptions-Liste’. Attendance list for August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lecture ‘Deutsche Verskunst’, summer semester 1820, showing Heinrich Heine’s name at the bottom.

Fig. 26 ‘Inskriptions-Liste’. Attendance list for August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lecture ‘Deutsche Verskunst’, summer semester 1820, showing Heinrich Heine’s name at the bottom.

© SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.

Fig. 27 ‘Inskriptions-Liste’. Attendance list for August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lecture ‘Einige homerische Fragen’, winter semester 1835‑36. Karl Marx’s name is marked ‘+6’.

Fig. 27 ‘Inskriptions-Liste’. Attendance list for August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lecture ‘Einige homerische Fragen’, winter semester 1835‑36. Karl Marx’s name is marked ‘+6’.

© SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.

  • 229 ‘Inscriptionslisten seiner Zuhörer’. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, V, 21. Ag. No. 62000, 201.
  • 230 The fees charged by a professor for attendance at a private lecture seem to have averaged at about (...)
  • 231 Such a one for Schlegel’s lecture on ‘Alte Weltgeschichte’ is reproduced in Reinhard Tgahrt et al. (...)
  • 232 Heine was inscribed for ‘Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Poesie’ (winter 1819- 20), and ‘Lied (...)
  • 233 Hess heard ‘Römische Geschichte’ (winter 1828-29, summer 1831), ‘Deutsche Sprache’ (winter 1830-31) (...)
  • 234 Marx heard ‘Einige Homerische Fragen’ (winter 1835-36) and ‘Ausgewählte Elegien des Propertius’ (su (...)

109Who came to his lectures? And how many? We can reconstruct this, and much more besides from his ‘Inscriptionslisten’.229 The names listed there are of those who actually signed up for his public and private lectures and paid their fees.230 They received a printed receipt, with details of the course and the venue, signed by the professor.231 Not surprisingly, his numbers were small during the first years of the university’s existence, and most of his students came from the Rhineland. That applied to Karl Simrock, the son of the Bonn music publisher (Haydn’s and Beethoven’s) and much later a professor; it held, too, for the son of the former ‘Kurator’ Count Solms, and for Windischmann’s sons. Above all, it was the case with the young man who signed the register first as ‘Harry Heine’, then ‘H: Heine St Juris’ and finally, flamboyantly, ‘H: Heine, St Juris aus Dußeldorff’ [sic].232 Jewish names are not uncommon on these lists, reflecting the processes of emancipation and assimilation, although neither ‘Moses Hess aus Trier’, the later socialist and Zionist,233 nor notably ‘Karl Heinrich Marx aus Trier’234 was to find joy in their German homeland, nor was the said ‘Harry Heine’.

  • 235 Letter of Haupt to AWS expressing indebtedness to his studies on the Nibelungenlied. SLUB Dresden, (...)

110Eduard Böcking is there, the later law professor in Bonn and (also as ‘Édouard’ or ‘Eduardus’) the editor of Schlegel’s works. Names once resonant in German culture feature, but now in a younger generation: Stolberg, Görres, Boisserée, Eichendorff, Brockhaus, even ‘von Goethe’ (his grandson). August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Heinrich Düntzer, Moritz Haupt,235 Karl Simrock and Nikolaus Delius were figures who learned their philological skills from Schlegel and who were to form part of the institutionalizing process of Germanic and English studies in German universities.

  • 236 The University of Bonn, 171.
  • 237 Ibid., 78.
  • 238 Undated letters to AWS. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (9), 2-3.

111By the time that Karl Marx was a student in Bonn, Schlegel was commanding audiences of between one and two hundred. From the early 1820s, non-German students occur in his lists, mainly from England (George Toynbee being but one). That anonymous London publication, The University of Bonn: Its Rise, Progress, & Present State, of 1844, while making capital out of the Prince Consort’s recent sojourn in Bonn,236 was telling prospective English students what they had known for almost twenty years: that this was the nearest German university to the British Isles, a fashionable one at that, and hosting ‘the celebrated translator of Shakspeare’.237 French students feature much less frequently, but one is Charles Galusky,238 his later biographer, another is the son of Prosper de Barante, formerly of the Coppet circle.

  • 239 The University of Bonn, xiv.
  • 240 Information in Amtliches Verzeichniß des Personals und der Studirenden auf der Königlichen Rheinisc (...)

112Schlegel’s lists also record another sociological process, the increasing number of German aristocrats and high nobility who were drawn to Bonn, especially from the middle of the 1830s onwards: ‘the Heirs-apparent of Sovereign Princes are often found cordially and affectionately mingling with the sons of the lowly and the unknown’, was how The University of Bonn saw it,239 and indeed the years 1838 to 1841 alone see up to six heirs to grand ducal and ducal thrones there,240 even ‘Prinz Georg von Preußen’ in one of Schegel’s last lectures. In the summer semester of 1838, Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, later to be chancellor of the German Empire, could have rubbed shoulders with three Swiss students and two Englishmen, all attending Schlegel’s lectures on The History of German Literature.

  • 241 See Franz Bosbach, ‘Prinz Albert und das universitäre Studium in Bonn und Cambridge’, in: Christa J (...)
  • 242 Bosbach, ‘Fürstliche Studienplanung’, 33, 37f.
  • 243 Not for the reason adduced by Renger (1983), that they were already published (222). They were not
  • 244 The University of Bonn, 171.

113It may have been thought that Bonn would offer these young gentlemen from the high nobility fewer distractions than a big city like Berlin; certainly the university’s academic reputation, in which Schlegel played his part, would be another consideration. It was a deciding factor in the education of the two young Saxe-Coburg princes, Ernst and Albert.241 Albert (while not inscribed among the student hearers) heard Schlegel’s lectures on General Introduction to Historical Studies (winter 1837‑38) and History of German Literature (summer 1838).242 If he took notes from Schlegel, they have not survived.243There were also private lectures. The University of Bonn stated deferentially: ‘He [Albert] delighted in the brilliant conversation of that patriarchal Professor, and the latter always contrived to render it so peculiarly interesting, that the Prince would never get tired of listening to him’.244 Maybe.

  • 245 Brockhaus to AWS 1840 (SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (3), 86); Goldstücker to AWS 1840 (ibi (...)
  • 246 Kirfel, 13. On AWS’s school see Ernst Windisch, Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie und indischen Al (...)

114Yet no group of students attending his lectures owed him loyalty and testified its indebtedness more than the Sanskritists. The classes on Sanskrit were private, but most of them also attended other lectures by him, above all his star pupil Christian Lassen from Bergen in Norway, his assistant, his colleague and then his successor. This applied also to Hermann Brockhaus, later Max Müller’s teacher; to Theodor Goldstücker from Königsberg, eventually to be a professor at University College London; to his colleague’s son Friedrich Heinrich Hugo Windischmann; to Otto Böhtlingk from St Petersburg, the later compiler of the great Sanskrit-German lexicon (1853‑ 75); to Martin Hammerich who was to translate Śakuntalâ into Danish (1845). Their letters express thanks and respect.245 They attest to Schlegel’s aim, stated already in 1823 to Lassen, of founding a school, of making Bonn a centre of oriental scholarship.246

The Content of the Lecture247

  • 247 On the links between the Berlin, Bonn and Berlin (1827) cycles see Frank Jolles, ‘August Wilhelm Sc (...)

115What of the content of the lectures themselves? They are essentially broad surveys that combine Schlegel’s notions of philology, together with the widest acquisition of factual knowledge; with more than a touch of the old humanist tradition, but with Winckelmann’s and Humboldt’s ideal of ‘Bildung’, the development of every faculty of the human mind towards a full moral and aesthetic perception. Judging from the surviving scripts, edited or unedited, we can say that they fall into two categories: those that have long sections of formulated prose and then subside into notes and headings (the lectures on the History of German Language and Poetry and on the Fine Arts exemplify this); and those that are from the start really only aides‑mémoire for the lecturer, headings separated by dashes, that would need his voice and his presence to supply the expanded remarks, the ad libitum asides, the quotations read out (the Lectures on General World History, the Greeks and Romans, on Academic Study). That would be the formal side. But whether the lectures contain large sections of informative material, dilate for instance on the notion of aesthetics and the subdivisions of the art forms, or trace German poetry from its beginnings down to the present day, there is always the underlying theme of origins.

116This is not merely a question of needing to know primeval developments in order to understand later processes, or of wanting to have as complete and unbroken an account as possible of historical developments. As Schlegel states, warming to his subject in his second Lecture on General World History:

Many people have had no history at all, at least not such as would deserve a place in universal history. Anyway, contributed nothing to the development of human capabilities. Isolated position of several very civilized peoples. India. China. Only rare contacts between Europe and inner Asia. [margin: Gog and Magog] Examples of the Cimmerians, Huns, Arabs, Tatars, Turks. No contacts at all between Europe and the centre of Africa, with America, etc.

  • 248 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XVIII, [p. 15f.].

Comparison of the history of the whole human race with a river with several arms, whose source and mouth are unknown. [margin: Still a lot to correct and fill out. But main outlines are there. Statistics of all states, if that was possible]. Survey of oikumene [community of nations] according to our present geographical knowledge and general traits, the ethnographical task of universal history, to explain the present state of the human race by linking cause and effect and tracing down to the earliest beginnings. The more recent can be solved by its being closer, but perhaps never completely. [margin: The way Schiller saw it. Inaugural lecture. What is and to what end do we study universal history? My view of it. Wrong about the age, in which he was caught up. Nescia mens hominum fati sortisque futurae [The mind of men ignorant of fate or future destiny].248

  • 249 Aeneid, X, 501.

117Much of the essential Schlegel is here. The universal view (ideally, the need to know everything), expressed in terms of geography, ethnography, statistics, historical records; the interreaction of peoples (where this is known); our guessings at knowledge of earliest beginnings and our ignorance of the future (the side-swipe at Schiller and basically at all philosophers of history for imposing a scheme on events and not letting these speak for themselves); the notion of oikumene, standing for historical associations now only traceable through common roots of language or mythology, leading to questions, posed in all of these lectures, of the primeval base of the human race (‘Ursitze’), its spreading out through incursions, migrations, colonies, ‘families of languages’ (the handy quotation from Virgil249 demonstrating the uses of memorisation).

  • 250 Cf. Thomas Campbell: ‘In fine, Mons. Schlegel is a visionary and a Platonist, who really believes t (...)
  • 251 ‘Theorie und allgemeine Geschichte der bildenden Künste’, 33f. ; AWS, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik (18 (...)
  • 252 Leitzmann, 72.

118Schlegel in fact wants to go back further than that, to a point from which everything else may irradiate and illumine all aspects of human existence. In his Lectures on the History of Art, he confesses to being a Platonist,250 believing in an Idea whose reflection we sense in nature and in art, where all physical manifestations and all philosophical notions are based on ‘Urbilder’ [primal images] and we have but intimations of a higher nature.251 To Humboldt he speaks of ‘divinatorische Erkenntniß’ [divinatory cognition].252 None of his contemporaries, Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, or his brother Friedrich, would have disputed this: it was at the time an essential tenet of any kind of aesthetic awareness and basic for the explication of any system of art. He is also restating his Hemsterhuisian beginnings that informed his Berlin lectures on the same subject.

  • 253 Ibid.
  • 254 Geschichte der Griechen und Römer’, 16a.
  • 255 Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Poesie, 24.
  • 256 Einleitung in die alte Weltgeschichte’, 37; Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Poesie, 30f.; ‘Gr (...)

119Schlegel the historian knows on the one hand that art emanates from an Ideal that must be represented through the human senses and their limitations. He is also acutely aware that art reflects the highest strivings in all areas of human endeavour; that as such the work of art cannot be seen in isolation from religion, customs, mythology, poetry, politics, mores, and style of living. Thus the study of art and its origins is essentially a kind of archaeology,253 a delving down into the past to find the traces of what once was, an ‘Urwelt’,254 the roots of language, the primordial ‘Sitz’ of the human race.255 It is not by chance that Schlegel in three separate lecture series and elsewhere uses the image of the comparative anatomist,256 reconstructing and restoring on the basis of archaeological and scientific evidence the ‘antediluvian origins’ of humankind, or through fragmentary inscriptions finding hints of languages now lost (Etruscan, Pelasgian) that might lead us back to the ‘Ursprache’.

  • 257 Einleitung in die allgemeine Weltgeschichte’, 68; ‘Theorie und allgemeine Geschichte der bildenden (...)

120Hence the need for all those documents, all the study of human striving, the ‘theory of the earth’, the diversity of human types (‘Raçen’ in Schlegel’s and his contemporaries’ terminology: he follows Blumenbach’s division of humanity into five ‘racial types’);257not out of any mere antiquarian interest, although Schlegel is not one to despise old humanist scholarship as mere ‘archaeology’. For, whether he is discussing the dramatic movements of the earth, the natural catastrophes and revolutions and their origins (which are reflected in mythology); whether it is a question of siting humankind in the physical roots of its culture (where languages and communities evolve); whether he is talking of the arts, of religion, of technology, of language, of poetry (the evidence of human accomplishment); in all this he is convinced that our species developed from common types and that all human records refer back to a ‘centre’ [Mittelpunkt]. There is no place here for the eighteenth century’s belief in an animal-like, primitive state out of which mankind first had to evolve in order to attain to rational capabilities. On the contrary: the records that we have, of language, of religion, of technology, point to a high degree of cognition, of early wisdom, ‘homo faber’ [man the maker and doer].

  • 258 Cf. H. B. Nisbet, ‘Die naturphilosophische Bedeutung von Herders “Aeltester Urkunde des Menschenges (...)
  • 259 ‘De l’Origine des Hindous’, Oeuvres, III, 62.
  • 260 Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Poesie, 30.

121None of this was essentially new. It can be related to the notion of ‘prisca theologia’, the belief in an ancient theological wisdom from which later civilization and language proceeds. It may have come to him through Herder or Hemsterhuis or Novalis.258 Schlegel had already said much of it in his unpublished Considérations sur la civilisation en général of 1805, but in the context of a general critique of the Enlightenment. Some more of it had gone into his major essays on the Nibelungenlied and his review of Chézy in 1815. By then however he was learning Sanskrit, taking in the whole discourse, into which his own brother Friedrich had tapped, of a postulated Indic ‘Ursprache’, certainly an ancient mother language of a linguistic family ‘from the Ganges to the Arctic’,259 and he had conducted philological studies of his own. True, his notions of the perfectibility and dignity of original language and its derivatives could not be explained in solely rational or scientific terms; language must be of divine origin260 (Schlegel remained unrepentantly Romantic in that regard); comparative philology can however establish traces of those roots in the related languages of which we have records (the essay of around 1815, De l’Étymologie en général, had set out the principles).

122Thus Germanic and by extension modern-day German, could be invested with the dignity reserved for Indian, Persian, Greek or Latin, through tracing its development from Gothic, which shared similar links with the primal language in the notional Central Asian ‘Sitz’ of this language family. (Schlegel does not yet use the term ‘Indo-Germanic’, current since Julius Klaproth’s coining in 1823, but the same is meant nevertheless.) While, says Schlegel, we do not know with any certainty where the Germanic peoples came from, we can adduce linguistic evidence to supply what is lacking in historical documentation. If early Germanic is lost, at least Gothic will tell us of peoples in migration, spreading out in tribes and their dialects, from those fragments recorded by Tacitus, to Ulfilas’s bible translation and notional epic poetry in Gothic. All of this gives historical authenticity and dignity to the Nibelungenlied, in a later form of Germanic, and invests it with the same venerability as the epic poetry of Persia and India. When Schlegel spends what may seem to be a disproportionate amount of time and energy on this Germanic epic, in order then to abandon it and consign it to his papers, he is satisfying part of the same philological and scholarly urge as when he does eventually edit and publish the Râmâyana instead.

  • 261 Griechen und Römer’, 15.
  • 262 Einleitung in die allgemeine Weltgeschichte’, 120.
  • 263 Entwurf zu Vorlesungen über die allgemeine Weltgeschichte’, 62.

123Religion, a basic expression of man’s experience of the world around him, is for Schlegel similarly not the expression of humankind’s allegedly crude beginnings. Quite the other way round: there must have been a pure ‘Naturreligion’ at first, an intimation of the cognition of natural truth,261 a belief even in the immortality of the soul.262 It’s overlaying and occluding by ‘superstition’, or the rise of polytheism, does not disprove its existence (or, rather, does not invalidate our inner sense of religious truth). We will of course wish to show the development of religion through sacred writings, while aware that they contain no ultimate explanations: the biblical Flood, for instance, is for Schlegel but one account among many of a terrestrial catastrophe in deep time. Instead, we will use the insights of Protestant hermeneutics and of philological criticism to illuminate religious and priestly record.263

  • 264 Colossale Wunderwerke der alten Welt’, ‘Einleitung in die allgemeine Weltgeschichte’, 145.

124Part of Schlegel’s reversal of eighteenth-century notions of progress is his insistence on a high degree of technical accomplishment among so-called ‘primitive man’. The massive architecture of early peoples (Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, Aztecs) shows a mastery of mathematics and of technology that goes hand in hand with their desire to build for eternity, not for the moment, to leave a permanent record for later generations of peoples (‘wonders of colossal works of the ancient world’).264

  • 265 I. C. Prichard, Darstellung der Aegyptischen Mythologie […] ( Bonn: Weber, 1837), v-xxxiv.

125Schlegel’s earlier essay of 1805 had cited as authorities Hemsterhuis, Bailly, Sir William Jones. In the Bonn lectures, other, more recent, names crop up: his own brother Friedrich, not only of course his Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, but also his 1819 review of Rhode’s Ueber den Anfang unserer Geschichte [On the Beginnings of our History]. Georges Cuvier is the authority for those remarks on comparative anatomy scattered throughout Schlegel’s different lectures. James Cowles Prichard mediated many of the insights of Schlegel’s Göttingen mentor Blumenbach in his Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (first 1813), and it was largely from him that Schlegel was to draw notions of a common human stock spreading out into diversity and intermixture. Schlegel in 1837 wrote a—not entirely uncritical—preface to the German translation of Prichard’s An Analysis of the Egyptian Mythology (1819).265 Above all one notices the presence and influence of both brothers Humboldt. Like them, he was of his times in branching out into the widest areas of knowledge: the theory of the physical world (Alexander von Humboldt), the theory of language (Wilhelm von Humboldt), a ‘world philology’ (Schlegel).

  • 266 SW, XII, 513-528; Roger Paulin, August Wilhelm Schlegels Kosmos (Dresden: Thelem, 2011), 9f.

126Much had happened to both since Alexander von Humboldt had identified the geological content of the lions in the Roman forum in 1805. Humboldt had been feted in the Paris of the Empire and the Restoration; now, from 1826‑27 court chamberlain to King Frederick William III of Prussia, he was still as polyglot and culturally international as ever and as enterprising. There had been in 1818 plans to complete the circumnavigation that had been broken off in South America, now to take in India and Tibet (the East India Company, however, was not letting a pronounced liberal like Humboldt into its territories). In 1817, Schlegel had written a highly favourable and laudatory review of the quarto edition of Humboldt’s Vues des cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique [Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of America] (1816), which for some reason he never published.266

  • 267 Weltumsegler der Wißenschaft’, SW, VIII, 213.

127Of course Schlegel, despite those foot journeys in Switzerland with the Staël boys, was never going to join Humboldt on Chimborazo; Humboldt was ever the ‘hands-on’ scientist,267 Schlegel the sedentary scholar. Yet Schlegel’s review made the point that Humboldt’s account of the Americas, while primarily directed at the scientific reader, had much to offer the historian and the philosopher. It would of course be his many-sidedness, his striving for synthesis, his universal conception, his constant relating of individual manifestations to some greater whole, but more concretely, his descriptions of Aztec monuments and inscriptions, that attracted Schlegel’s attention, his notions of language families, and much more besides.

  • 268 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (11), 26.
  • 269 Ibid., 35.
  • 270 Ibid., LI (17). On this Roger Paulin, ‘Die Ähnlichkeit der Götter. Ein Billet Alexander von Humbold (...)

128Alexander von Humboldt was altogether more informal in his dealings with Schlegel than his rather austere brother Wilhelm. Alexander could write ‘Cher et excellent Confrère’ to Schlegel,268 whereas Wilhelm always used the formal address ‘Ew. Hochwohlgebornen’ (and Schlegel ‘Ew. Excellenz’). He passed on snippets of information to Schlegel and also asked him for favours (could, for instance, the ‘oldest of his friends in Germany’ inform him of references to poetic nature description in antiquity?).269 He drew his attention to a drawing of Mayan gods that he thought Schlegel might wish to compare with their Indian counterparts;270 not to give credence to some of the more fantastic exodus theories, but out of a general interest in comparative civilization theory, mythology and its expression in art. He may also have been slightly teasing Schlegel, knowing that the editor of the Indische Bibliothek was never going to concede any superiority over India, the cradle of all cultures, especially not from practitioners of human sacrifice.

129Wilhelm von Humboldt, the former minister of state and Prussian envoy in Rome and London, the theoretician of classicism, the philologist, grammarian and translator, treated Schlegel with great respect, even receiving him in 1827 at his seat in Tegel when Schlegelvisited Berlin. Yet they agreed to differ over a number of crucial points. It was Schlegel’s example that had led him to teach himself Sanskrit and conduct a correspondence on issues of grammar, even to contribute to Schlegel’s Indische Bibliothek (some of it hard going for non-specialists). They agreed on the task of the historian, to present facts (not a philosophy), but to do so creatively and with imagination. But they were to disagree publicly and radically on the role of translation, for Humboldt never more than a pis-aller, for Schlegel the gateway to alien cultures.

4.2 India

130In a much-quoted letter to Goethe of 1 November, 1824, Schlegel wrote:

  • 271 August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel im Briefwechsel mit Schiller und Goethe, ed. Josef Körner and (...)

From the very outset of my career as a writer I had made it my especial business to bring to light forgotten and unrecognized material. Thus I progressed from Dante to Shakespeare, to Petrarch, to Calderón, to the Old German epics; almost everywhere I did not achieve anything like half of what I intended; but I did succeed in providing a stimulus. In this way, I had to some extent exhausted European literature and turned to Asia to provide a new adventure. It was a good choice: for in the later years of life it is an amusing diversion to solve riddles; and here I need not worry about running out of material. Leaving aside the historical importance, the philosophical and poetical content, the very form of the language would draw me, which in comparison with its younger sisters provides such remarkable insights into the laws of language formation.271

  • 272 Krisenjahre, II, 394.
  • 273 ‘Indien in seinen Hauptbeziehungen. Einleitung. Über die Zunahme und den gegenwärtigen Stand unsere (...)
  • 274 Cf. the minor Camões renaissance around 1830, esp. Tieck’s novel Tod des Dichters (1833).

This letter could easily—if misleadingly—be construed as a statement of bankruptcy on Schlegel’s part, an admission to the ever-productive, ever self‑renewing Goethe of the depletion of his powers, the abandonment of poetry for philology. Of course it is no such thing. It may have seemed to Schlegel in the early 1820s, as he wrote to Auguste de Staël, that his interest lay solely in ‘antediluvian poetry’.272 Yet against that one can set his genuine interest in the continuation of the Shakespeare project (while no longer believing that he had the powers to carry it out), the reissue in 1828 in his Kritische Schriften of significant reviews from the 1790s, and his statement there of the European role of modern German literature and ‘Wissenschaft’. He was also, as we saw, lecturing in Bonn on the widest spectrum of European, of world, literature. The second of his two long articles on European knowledge of India (1831)273 provided the background to Luis de Camões’s Lusiadas, promised, but not delivered, in his Blumensträuße of 1804; it also supplied his mature judgment on this late Renaissance epic, which he now preferred to Ariosto or Tasso. He was as well reminding his German readers of the significant Portuguese presence in India, long before an Englishman had set foot there. By coincidence or not, it echoed much of what his friend Ludwig Tieck was also saying.274

131But could Schlegel really be claiming to Goethe that he had turned to the Orient as it were faute de mieux? There was enough evidence—that early poem for Bürger on the death of the Brahmin, the various statements on the East from his first maturity, the elegy to Carl Schlegel, his Considérations of 1805, his approbation and admiration of Friedrich Schlegel’s Sanskrit studies—to suggest that at any moment he might simply drop Germanic or Romance if given the chance. But of course the Staël years were not conducive; there was no opportunity for the frenetic bursts of language acquisition that his brother Friedrich had performed in Paris.

  • 275 Briefe, I, 528.
  • 276 Krisenjahre, II, 428.
  • 277 Well summarized in the article by Johannes Mehlig, ‘Indien’, in: Goethe-Handbuch, ed. Bernd Witte e (...)
  • 278 ‘Von Pfaffen und Fratzen uns befreit’. Zahme Xenien, II. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe un (...)
  • 279 Wieneke, 162f., 260.
  • 280 Karl S. Guthke, Goethes Weimar und ‘Die große Öffnung in die weite Welt’, Wolfenbütteler Forschunge (...)

132There were for a start Schlegel’s and Goethe’s respective attitudes to India: Schlegel’s unreserved belief that ‘everything in ancient India is original; everything bears the stamp of the creative, inventive, speculative mind’,275 ‘theology of the most profound’;276 Goethe’s much more selective approach,277 affirming great poetry where he saw it (the Jones/Forster version of the Śakuntalâ, for instance), but withdrawing, sometimes with marked distaste, from other aspects, the teeming cosmogony, or those ‘Fratzen’,278 the grotesque faces that he saw staring out of Indian art. It did not prevent him from taking an intellectual interest—ordering Schlegel’s Râmâyana edition for Weimar279—and generally keeping his finger on the pulse of travel and discovery in those regions.280

133Whereas Schlegel’s ‘Orient’ had India, and to a lesser extent also Egypt, as its two main points of reference, Goethe’s took in Persia and the Arabic and Judaic world (both of them of course knew their Bible). Goethe’s Westöstlicher Divan of 1819, bearing a dedication to the leading French orientalist, Silvestre de Sacy, presented an Orient that brought together his early poetic interest in Koranic motifs with a serious study of Persian and Arabic. Yet everything in the Divan touched on poetry: we read his Noten und Abhandlungen [Notes and Treatises] to the Divan because they contain the key to poetry. A vision of Persia came alive, a private world that drew on the Orient as it chose, playful, sometimes seriously playful, protean, taking notions and motifs that he found fruitful and attractive for poetic purposes; but always symbolic of a higher synthesis of man, nature, time and history, the individual and the universe. For Schlegel, India had poetry; it did not immediately become it: others must bring it alive. India had formed part of the Romantic urges that had led to poetry, where mythology and translation, the transference of great poetry from one cultural sphere to another, were an enriching and enlivening force. Novalis’s vision of ‘Indostan’ in the Athenaeum in 1800 had been poetry representing religious myth and historical fulfilment. Schlegel, no less a Romantic mythologizer than Novalis when it suited him, was to pass this on as ideas through the readers of his editions, especially of the Bhagavat-Gîtâ, who included certainly Schopenhauer, possibly also Hegel and Nietzsche. They contained enough poetic potential for others to exploit creatively.

  • 281 Cf. ‘Die Religion Mahomets, des unwissendendsten aller Menschen, war freilich darauf eingerichtet, (...)
  • 282 ‘Les Mille et une nuits. Receuil de contes originairement indiens’, Oeuvres, III, 3-23.
  • 283 ‘Nous devons imiter l’impassibilité de ces brahmanes dont nous admirons les sages maximes’, ibid, 2 (...)
  • 284 ich besitze selbst eine kleine Sammlung von Idolen’. Indische Bibliothek, II, 431.

134Goethe and Schlegel were in agreement that Orient and Occident were equal partners in giving and receiving. But Schlegel could not accept all the premises of the Divan. He was not basically interested in Persian poetry; above all, the Persian language was for him essentially a derivative of Sanskrit. Crucially, Persia, once the land and home of Zoroastrianism, had been subjected to Islamic conquest, and that was that. Muslim power or influence—Arab, Persian, Mughal—was for him inimical to culture, essentially uncreative, destructive, at most borrowing from ‘superior’ cultures.281 Hence his conviction that the Thousand and One Nights must ultimately be of Indian origin, not Persian or Arab.282 This did not make Schlegel an uncritical admirer of Hinduism—it, too, had its later accretions—and not of Buddhism. He could certainly identify with the status, spiritual depth, repose,283 and intellectual achievement that he perceived in Brahmanic culture, its commitment to peace, its absence of a priestly hierarchy (or so Schlegel wished to believe). Entering into the world of the primeval language of Sanskrit, reading its great texts, also meant acquiring its lore: one needed to be familiar with its mythology, which deities were which and where their sway held, which aspects they bore, which legends had clustered round which. It extended to architecture: the figures of Indian gods and goddesses permitted comparison with other ancient cultures, Egyptian or Aztec. He was of his time in referring to them as ‘idols’,284 but certainly they were to be preferred to a culture that banned the figural representation of the divine altogether.

135Like Goethe’s of the Orient, Schlegel’s knowledge of India was at second hand. It was not the only paradox or contradiction that he shared with Goethe. There was his preoccupation with what can generally be called ‘origins’: the beginnings of human utterance, technical achievement, culture, poetry, mythology, religious observance, as it might have been and was now traceable through monuments in language or in stone; but also through a living memory of observance, rite and oral tradition. This is what made Schlegel different from Greek and Latin classical scholars and why he needed to move out and beyond them, while of course retaining the skills and insights that they had taught him. Unlike Classical Greece and Rome, India was still alive. Sanskrit was still present in India and was the undying expression of a civilization still in being. This culture, as he saw it, compared with so many others, had been able to maintain its essential integrity, its timeless calm and serenity, the uninterrupted line of its mythology. The origins, that in the case of Greek and Latin needed to be traced through painstaking philological and archaeological processes, were for Sanskrit still there. Once one had acquired the language, the whole of this civilization, superior to any that succeeded or overlaid it, became the possession of the ‘Indianist’. Especially the German academic Indianist, so much better qualified than others to bring that civilization alive. This is what lies behind Schlegel’s Sanskrit studies, his three editions of classical Sanskrit texts, and much of his Indische Bibliothek.

  • 285 Berliner Kalender (1831), 122.
  • 286 Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit’. [Captured Greece captured the uncouth victor]. Horace, Epistl (...)

136But the conviction that this culture was superior was not enough. For it, too, had been subjected to incursions, challenges, conquests, from within, but especially from without. That Indian culture had withstood these, was surmounting them now and was adapting to foreign military and administrative rule, was also part of the narrative of India. There was no escaping the fact that European contact and conquest—for good or ill, and much of it was for ill—had made this world and its culture accessible. It was the dilemma faced by Schlegel himself, the younger brother of a Hanoverian officer in the service of the East India Company, or by Henry Colebrooke or Sir James Mackintosh, the proconsuls of a colonizing power, yet all involved intellectually in the cultural heritage that they were administering. By extension, it even applied to Alexander von Humboldt too, Schlegel’s authority in matters pertaining to the theory of the earth. One half of Schlegel found the East India Company distasteful—pragmatic, commercial, political—but the other, despite itself, had to be grateful when the Company’s servants helped to open up India to the European gaze. Schlegel’s analogy of British rule in India with ancient Rome285 was right in terms of their respective imperial hegemonies; but was there not also something of Horace’s Graecia capta,286 the conqueror taken captive, the vanquisher vanquished by the culture that it had encountered?

  • 287 Cf. Josef Körner, ‘Indologie und Humanität’, most accessible in: JK, Philologische Schriften und Br (...)

137Above all, it elicited a ‘Zivilisationskritik’.287 This was not, say, of the Enlightenment, as in that early essay of 1805, but of European contact with India in general. It formed the substance of those major articles in the Berliner Kalender. Both of them hanker, Romantic-style, but also set out the historical record—such as it was—of ‘civilisations’ that claimed superiority, and in many ways still did; which however failed to measure up to the civilisation over which their rule extended. It explains his ambivalence to the East India Company as both boon and bugbear. His critique of Christian missionary zealotry and arrogance in India also fits very well his mood in the 1820s and 1830s, involving a much wider scrutiny of the phenomenon of religion itself, touched off by his brother Friedrich. Someone who had to examine the role of religion in his own life, as Schlegel did, was in a good position to consider its effects when, as with Christian missionary activity in India, it developed into fanaticism and assumed cultural supremacy. While lacking Humboldt’s geopolitical and physiocratic thrust, and crucially, not being based on personal observation, it is fair to say that Schlegel’s two essays in the Berliner Kalender have affinities with Humboldt’s Vues des cordillères and his surveys of Cuba and Mexico, those writings that ensured his blacklisting by the East India Company when he hoped to continue them with a narrative of India. These same essays also set Schlegel apart from academic Sankritists like Bopp or Lassen. They represent a voice addressed to a different audience, non-specialist, only generally informed and interested. They epitomize the ‘half-way’ status that Schlegel occupies as an orientalist, the stringent editor but also the unashamed populariser.

  • 288 Berliner Kalender (1829), 5.
  • 289 Berliner Kalender (1831), 138f., 155.

138Because of those lines of continuity from deep time, one could not be indifferent to the physical opening up of India. Like his contemporaries Cuvier, Malte-Brun, and especially Humboldt, Schlegel wanted to know everything about the ‘cosmos’. Understanding Indian geography and topography (the source of the Ganges) opened up vistas of ‘higher peaks than Chimborazo, that a second Saussure or Humboldt will hardly ever scale’.288 There was no need, as there once was, to travel there: the onus fell on European ‘Indianisten’ to give an accurate and sympathetic account.289 He met people who had been there; he collected artefacts; he was familiar with the relevant historical, geographical and topographical sources, which form the basis of those two articles in the Berliner Kalender.

  • 290 Neueste Mittheilungen der Asiatischen Gesellschaft zu Calcutta’, Indische Bibliothek, I, 371-390.

139Passage after passage in Schlegel’s Berliner Kalender and Indische Bibliothek illustrated this, none better than his note on a recent publication by the Asiatic Society in Calcutta:290

  • 291 Ibid., 371.

Nature description promises directly applicable results, and it follows that the present and future preoccupy the owners of the land more pressingly than the remote past. Of course the more exact knowledge gained of India in respect of its physical characteristics and its present state must be of no inconsiderable benefit to the investigation of its prehistory.291

  • 292 Ibid., 388.
  • 293 C. Ritter, ‘Landeskunde von Indien’, Berliner Kalender auf das Gemein-Jahr 1829, 87-210, plate faci (...)

140Thus, he says, Captain Webb and others, in giving us an exact topographical description of the fabled sources of the Yamuna and the Ganges, have linked the geographical precision of a Saussure or a Humboldt with the Râmâyana, with Indian creation myths and their still living presence. Schlegel, too, sought to give his readers a physical description, but as a European who had never been there and had no intention of ever doing so, he had recourse to its ultimate European counterpart in the Swiss Alps and the conventions of the sublime.292 One must only magnify a little, he claimed, and the ‘majesty’ of the Himalaya will become present in the valleys, ravines and passes of the Jura and Rigi, the avalanches and cascades, the peaks and icefields—his own recollection of the river Aar in spate, a rainbow over its cataract. This is Schlegel at his most spirited, and we might wish for more. The engravers of the Berliner Kalender in 1829 had encountered the same problem. To illustrate an article on the topography of India,293 they produced a distinctly Swiss-like veduta of the sources of the Ganges, a temple and some turbaned figures supplying the oriental costume.

  • 294 Kirfel, 74f.
  • 295 Leitzmann, 245f.
  • 296 Briefe, I, 531.
  • 297 In: Journal Asiatique 4 (1824), 105-116, 236-252; 5 (1824), 240-252; 6 (1825), 232-250.

141Schlegel’s Indian studies in the 1820s and 1830s did not take up some hermetically sealed compartment in his intellectual, academic—or even personal—life. They were integral to his whole existence; they represented the essential Schlegel. In that respect they cannot be divorced from the ups and downs of his private or academic life, although it is worth observing that more and more of his time and substance was being given up to these matters than to anything else. If, as he told Christian Lassen, he took on academic burdens like the rectorship, it was ultimately to further his position in the university and through this the status of India in the university’s hierarchy.294 Or if, as he confided to Wilhelm von Humboldt, he became a member of the city council or the ‘Society for Civic Improvement’ (from 1825), behind this lay similar, less selfless motives.295 It is also true to say that the polemical and adversarial tone that marked his public persona in these years was audible in his oriental studies as well. There was less of the ‘impassibilité des bramanes’ than of those ‘curious polemical dances’—his words later to August Böckh296—that he performed with Chézy, with Simon Alexandre Langlois (whom Chézy used as a front to criticise Schlegel’s Bhagavad-Gîtâ edition),297with Heeren, with H. H. Wilson. It was part of other processes: the chagrin at seeing Ludwig Tieck continuing a Shakespeare that he could have done better had he had the time or inclination; the fracas with Voss; the love-hate relationship with his brother Friedrich; the affront of Goethe’s correspondence with Schiller—all of them opening up old wounds and stirring up old resentments.

142It was noticeable, too, that his Indian studies shared the shift into French which characterizes so much of his writing in the 1830s—after the Indische Bibliothek had ceased publication—and which was later to take up a considerable part of his posthumous Oeuvres publiées en français, confirming the nineteenth-century view of him as less-than-German or even a mere appendage of Madame de Staël.

143Schlegel had had to acquire a knowledge of the ancient language to the highest professional standards. It all might have happened earlier, had Madame de Staël not taken him on her travels. Apart from the crucial factor of language—he and Franz Bopp would eye each other as the premier Sanskritists in Germany and possibly in France (Bopp’s knowledge being superior)—there was nothing in his method or approach to Sanskrit studies that was essentially new. What was needed was a new focus and status. His brother Friedrich had of course acted as a spur, but no more than that. August Wilhelm knew Sanskrit better and he edited texts that Friedrich had published in only partial or imperfect translations; nor would he follow Friedrich into philosophical speculation. He could draw on his own recent preoccupations. The two major works of 1817‑18, on etymology in general, and on Provençal literature, converged with his Sanskrit researches as their methodology was reapplied to new subjects of study. His various publications on the Nibelungenlied, too, had had to do with origins, habitations, migrations from ‘Ursitze’, the spread of languages from a common source, ideas that were basic to his notions of India, and they, as well, stressed the centrality of the text. Where the text did not exist in a reliable form or was present in variants only, it must be re-established in a definitive edition. This is what links his Nibelungenlied studies with his three Sanskrit editions: Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Râmâyana, and Hitopadeśa.

  • 298 Leitzmann, 61.
  • 299 Ibid., 165.
  • 300 Ibid., 214.

144The analogy went even further: those three were the essential texts conducive to a first understanding, respectively, of ancient Indian philosophy, epic poetry, and fable, and thus eminently suitable for both scholarly and pedagogic purposes. No less a person than the professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, Horace Hayman Wilson, would be told this. The Nibelungenlied, allowing for differences, was to serve a similar function in an even wider national consciousness: the effort in collating and editing was in proportion to the status of the poetry itself. Yet anyone comparing Schlegel’s essays on the Nibelungenlied or even the (unpublished) edition with the Sanskrit texts will notice immediate differences. There was no concession to the non-expert. Readers had to know Sanskrit (of course): Schlegel told Wilhelm von Humboldt that ten readers in Europe and Asia would suffice.298 Should they need a translation, it was in Latin, as were the notes to further understanding. It is interesting that Wilhelm von Humboldt, despite his scepticism otherwise on the subject of translation, urged Schlegel more than once to do a free version of the Bhagavat-Gîtâ for German readers,299 or even a joint Indian project, Humboldt to do the philosophical writings, Schlegel the epic.300 Schlegel did not take up the idea. In this respect, he had come a long way from translating Shakespeare or Calderón, where questions of editions were of little relevance and the assimilation of the foreign poetic text to the needs of German was all in all.

  • 301 Oppeln-Bronikowski, 426 ; Carl Ritter, Die Vorhalle Europäischer Völkergeschichten vor Herodotus, u (...)
  • 302 Indische Bibliothek, II, 373-473; Heeren’s ignorance is also alluded to in Râmâyana, Praef., lv; He (...)
  • 303 Réflexions sur l’étude des langues asiatiques adressées à Sir James Mackintosh, suivies d’une lettr (...)
  • 304 Lettre à M. Horace Hayman Wilson’, ibid., 212-246.

145The analogies with his other endeavours also end there. As he reminded his readers and interlocutors at every turn, the study of India encompassed the Sanskrit language and texts, but also philology and etymology, philosophy, theology, geography, astronomy, architecture. Above all language, without which the rest made little sense. Indian studies could not be like Ritter’s, he told Koreff in 1821, for Carl Ritter had been one of those scholars who had collected every conceivable reference in Greek and Latin to—in his case—the Caucasus301 but not in the ancient indigenous languages spoken there. He was to reiterate this in various contexts and combinations, temperately to the readers of the Indische Bibliothek, in the reissue of his statement of intent (and achievement), Ueber den gegenwärtigen Zustand der Indischen Philologie; intemperately in the same journal to the hapless Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren, the Göttingen historian who, in Schlegel’s eyes, had presumed to embark on an account of the trade and politics of the ancient peoples without the requisite language tools;302 emphatically in his published letter to Sir James Mackintosh of 1832,303 where issues of translation also obtruded; or in its appendix, addressed to the (in Schlegel’s oversensitive eyes) disdainful Horace Hayman Wilson who had seen fit to question the linguistic credentials of continental Sanskrit scholarship.304

  • 305 Ibid., 24-94. Published three times in AWS’s lifetime: Transactions of the Royal Society of Literat (...)
  • 306 Oeuvres, II, 281.
  • 307 Ibid., III, 62.
  • 308 Ibid., II, 80, 83. On Celts cf. his ‘Aphorismen die Etymologie des Französischen betreffend’, SW, V (...)

146The discourse in this wide area of study was conducted in a variety of contexts, and—it has to be said—with a certain repetitiveness. But not everyone read Sanskrit, not everyone even read German. Thus the later essay, De l’Origine des Hindous (1834, republished in 1838 and 1842)305 rehearsed essentially what he had had to say on etymology in 1818 or what he was telling his Bonn students about geography, movement, settlement, ‘Raçe’. What was new in 1834 were some words in season for ‘celtomanes’, who happened to be in France, and their ‘chimères celtiques’.306 For all his resounding phrases about a common language ‘from the banks of the Ganges […] to the confines of the Arctic ocean’,307 he was to exclude the Celts from his scheme of things, despite proof to the contrary from James Cowles Prichard or in spite of Adolphe Pictet,308 at most ceding a little ground.

  • 309 Briefe, I, 472f., II, 208f.; the insights of these essays summed up in Latin, Opuscula, 402‑414. Ka (...)
  • 310 Berliner Kalender (1831), 122.
  • 311 Ibid., 125.

147One could find essentially the same points being made in an altogether more popular context, those two long articles on European contacts with India for the Berliner Kalender of 1829 and 1831.309 Here Schlegel recognized the need for a more general readership, especially after his art lectures in Berlin in 1827. Had they been republished, these essays would have shown later readers a Schlegel not only setting out his encyclopedic knowledge of this fascinating area of human exploration and cultural transfer, but doing so in a highly readable fashion. The subject involved whatever Europeans—Greeks, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British (not forgetting Arabs)—had brought back from India through trade or conquest and how in so doing they had made known an ancient civilization and its manifestations. The price was a high one, and Schlegel spares no-one, whether their motives were material gain or religious proselytism, who sought to impose Western ‘superiority’ on to a culture more ancient than their own. All things considered, Schlegel is relatively lenient on the British political administration and its role in opening up the country both physically, through topographical survey and description, and culturally. His own brother Carl Schlegel had after all had his brief part in this process. His remark that British rule in India was akin to Rome’s power after the Punic Wars310 was a tribute to the administrators whom by now he had met and respected: Mackintosh, Colebrooke, Malcolm, Johnston, Tod. It was also prescient: British imperial domination was to be no more lasting that Roman; it was a ‘golden colossus with feet of clay’.311

  • 312 Correspondence with Schilling von Canstatt, Briefe, I, 630f. ; Choix de lettres d’Eugène Bournouf 1 (...)
  • 313 Leitzmann, 73f., 187f.
  • 314 Ibid., 195.
  • 315 Ibid., 231-238.
  • 316 AWS, ‘Observations sur la critique du Bhagavad-Gîtâ, insérée dans le Journal Asiatique’, Journal As (...)

148Not everything was intended for public scrutiny. Learned correspondence provided an intellectual exchange, as with Baron Paul Ludwig Schilling von Canstatt, the itinerant Russo-German inventor and scholar of Tibetan and Chinese, who caused him to cast his eye both northwards and further eastwards;312 or with Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose study of the Javanese Kâwi language gave evidence of a once wider spread of Sanskrit. Despite all the necessary deference, Schlegel was able to drop his guard with Humboldt and postulate, Romantic-style, a primeval language in deep time, a primordial event akin to the moment of creation itself, when language came into being in all of its original forms. Human amnesia, neglect, confusion, had led to the loss of originary form and expression; but Sanskrit was the language least affected by these abrading processes. Its wealth was discernible in Persian, Greek, Latin, Germanic (not Celtic, of course).313 For Humboldt, this was too unhistorical, too much redolent of a superhuman (i.e. divine) intervention in language creation.314 Altogether, the more cautious Humboldt showed a restraining hand, both in personal matters as well as linguistic: he urged Schlegel to be less unkind to Bopp, their fellow-labourer in the field, and not to overreact to Langlois,315 (which he manifestly did).316

The Indische Bibliothek

Fig. 28 Indische Bibliothek. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm von Schlegel (Bonn, 1820- 1830). Title page issued in 1823.

Fig. 28 Indische Bibliothek. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm von Schlegel (Bonn, 1820- 1830). Title page issued in 1823.

© And by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BYNC 4.0.

  • 317 Contents (by AWS unless otherwise indicated): I (1820, reissued 1823 with new title page): Heft 1 ( (...)

149All of these things find their confluence in the Indische Bibliothek (1820- 23, 1826-27 and 1830),317 issued by the Bonn publisher Weber in irregular numbers. As is so often the case with Schlegel, it is difficult to pin down its significance to one single factor. First and foremost, however, it was the only journal that he edited on his own.

  • 318 Neues Repertorium für Biblische und Morgenländische Litteratur, 2 parts (Jena, 1790). See Andrea Po (...)

150It was also—this needs saying at the outset—the first German journal devoted solely to India, as opposed to general oriental (‘morgenländisch’) matters, unlike the periodical that his own father-in-law Paulus had once edited in Jena with ‘morgenländisch’ in its subtitle,318 or Julius Klaproth’s Asiatisches Magazin, issued in Weimar in 1802‑03. Despite its resounding opening—a dedication to Prince Hardenberg and a reissue of his manifesto Ueber den gegenwärtigen Zustand der Indischen Philologie—the Indische Bibliothek was, if not an outright failure, at least not the success that Schlegel might have hoped for. Then again conflicting priorities, as so often with him, became evident. It did sell 400 copies, but it really was little more than an occasional miscellany. It could not escape the influence of the Asiatick Researches, published in Calcutta, nor could it shake off entirely the extreme eclecticism of those periodicals. His dedication promised to cast the net over the immeasurable areas of India’s past and present, to interrelate ancient and modern, all aspects, geography, natural history, sacred writings, religion, politics, art and architecture—not forgetting comparative linguistics. It was also a one-man band, or almost, with Schlegel as editor-in-chief and main contributor. By contrast, the Journal Asiatique in Paris, founded in 1822, had an editorial board that included Chézy, Fauriel, Klaproth, Abel-Rémusat and Silvestre de Sacy, and its content was by no means restricted to India. A German organisation, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, Germany’s Asiatic society, was not founded until 1845. By then oriental studies would stand on a much more secure footing than they did in 1820, but even so there was no question of a journal devoted to India only.

  • 319 Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (...)

151The Indische Bibliothek has, in addition, along with the rest of Schlegel’s Indian writings, suffered from the comparison with his brother’s Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, which has been edited and explicated and integrated into the main stream of oriental studies in a way that the Indische Bibliothek has not. The older perception is hard to shake off—Max Müller in 1861 can stand for many others—that Friedrich, a ‘man of genius’, discovered a ‘new world’ with his ‘poetic vision’, while August Wilhelm, as set out in his letter to Goethe, merely expanded his literary interests.319

  • 320 Leitzmann, 87.
  • 321 Sanscrit Poetry’, The Quarterly Review, XLV (1831), 1-57, ref. 4.

152This may sound too negative. Schlegel did actually want to reach a wider educated audience, but then again he became increasingly disdainful of such a body, writing to Wilhelm von Humboldt that the Indische Bibliothek was not intended for entertainment.320 That it certainly was not, especially once a knowledge of Sanskrit was assumed. German, French and Latin were taken for granted, indeed the Indische Bibliothek was living proof, if any was needed, that German was a language of international academic and scholarly discourse and that one required it for the full spectrum of oriental studies. It was the assumption behind the flattering mention that Schlegel received in 1831 in John Murray’s Quarterly Review, before his last triumphant visit to England.321 The essay on the elephant offered one of the few pieces for a general readership, but the same readers were also expected to cope with De studio etymologico in the original. There was clearly an element of ‘take it or leave it’.

153Were these not also the failings of the Romantic journals with which he had been associated, especially that youthful enterprise, the Athenaeum, boldly pronouncing the brothers Schlegel to be its sole creators and aiming deliberately to affront the ‘average reader’? The Indische Bibliothek could not adopt such an uncompromising stance towards its readers: dedicated as it was to the state chancellor, Prince Hardenberg, the patron and benefactor of Schlegel’s Indian projects, it required a more deferential tone. It did no harm to remind Hardenberg in dedication and preface that the generosity of the Prussian state was not going to be expended on half measures. Hardenberg, who had studied in Göttingen, would find here echoes of the historical school that had produced both Schlegel and himself and that had seen India as the ‘cradle of civilisation’. And so it was in these pages that Schlegel set out his knowledge of India, his aims, his principles, his disagreements with other Sanskritists; it was as near as he ever got to enunciating in public his most cherished views on India, the history of Sanskrit studies and their challenges (as in that statement of intent originally written for an academic audience in Bonn), or an account of Sanskrit poetry (with some samples).

154It made, as said, but few accommodations to the general reader. Its very title—not Indisches Magazin or Indisches Journal—suggested some solidity, accented less the miscellany that the journal essentially was, and more the solid repository, the ‘library’. It had slightly eighteenth-century echoes, of Eschenburg perhaps, of endeavours far back in the 1780s, pioneering in their time, a connection with an older antiquarianism now of course overtaken by new academic scholarship. By 1823, however, when Schlegel reissued the first volume, he had largely abandoned any concessions. Hereafter a knowledge of Sanskrit became increasingly desirable. When one considers that the only major contributors to the Indische Bibliothek apart from Schlegel himself were Chézy, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Lassen, the last two in a strict Sanskritist mode, it was clear that it was becoming a journal for specialists or enthusiasts, or both.

  • 322 Friedrich Schlegels Briefe an seinen Bruder August Wilhelm, ed. Oskar F. Walzel [Walzel] (Berlin: S (...)
  • 323 Indische Bibliothek, I, 34f. Cf. Josef Körner, ‘Indologie und Humanität’, 137-160 ; Guthke (1978), (...)
  • 324 Burnouf, Choix de lettres, 34.

155Did it have a message for that other late Romantic periodical, his brother’s Concordia, battling in rearguard actions against the Zeitgeist and really, as he wrote, a Discordia?322 Ex negativo perhaps, by pointing eastwards away from Europe; directly, in its sharp attack on missionary zealotry (privately, he was to equate Jesuits and Methodists in their conversion tactics) and its disdain for a wisdom not of its own revelation.323 As it was, the Indische Bibliothek itself was to devote more pages than was good for it to controversies. There was Humboldt’s detailed rebuttal of Langlois’s (Chézy’s) critique of his Bhagavad-Gîtâ edition, delivered in the Journal Asiatique, that added to the discomfiture in Paris (Chézy’s ‘fureur’).324 Was there any need to devote a hundred pages to gratuitously and tediously punishing the unsuspecting Heeren for not knowing Sanskrit, and over a hundred to letting Christian Lassen loose on Bopp’s Sanskrit grammar? This was not Brahmanic calm, as Schlegel understood it, but part of a general fractiousness in public discourse into which Schlegel allowed himself to be drawn in these Bonn years.

  • 325 Indische Bibliothek, I, 129-231.
  • 326 Meyers Lexikon. 7. Auflage, 12 vols and 3 supplements (Leipzig : Bibliographisches Institut, 1924-3 (...)

156This however lay in the future. The first numbers of the Indische Bibliothek, reissued as one volume in 1823, were generally informative and civilized. Schlegel’s review of Bopp’s Nalus edition had a moderate, although authoritative, tone; his discussion of H. H. Wilson’s Sanskrit dictionary gave him an opportunity to discourse on the essential purity of the ancient language, its freedom from modern admixtures and contaminations: as it came into being, so too did customs, religion and poetry. There was the extraordinary essay on the elephant.325 This is the other Schlegel, who in the Vienna Lectures, in the essays on the Nibelungenlied, later in the Berliner Kalender, could wear his learning lightly and use to advantage his considerable skills as a prose writer. Unfortunately, Böcking chose not to republish it—it might have changed later views on Schlegel—but it has found its way subsequently into Meyer’s encyclopedia (it still winks complicitly out of Meyer’s article ‘Elefanten’ in 1925).326 A human and accessible Schlegel perhaps, proud of the four-inch high bronze elephants in his own house, a modest reminder of the attention once lavished by the patriarchal and heroic culture of India on this noble creature? We are not spared sources; it could not be otherwise: Bochart, Robertson, Cuvier, Gesner, Langlès, Sir John Malcolm, and the Asiatick Researches. We go from Ophir to Alexander, to Hannibal—and then to India. We have to learn the elephant’s various names and their etymology; more importantly, we see elephants as the companions of gods and men (the god Ganesha is elephant- headed); their bulk, but also their delicacy of movement, symbolise the mythical link between the world of the senses and non-corporeal truth; they step through that multi-figured world into the realm of poetry.

  • 327 Und so will ich, ein- für allemal, Keine Bestien in dem Götter-Saal! Die leidigen Elefanten-Rüssel (...)

157We see the elephant’s place in Sanskrit literature and in art: Schlegel describes the Elephanta cave near Bombay and calls for an understanding of Indian sculpture. Start with its animal depictions, he says, and you will find your way into these otherwise alien art forms. It was a veiled replique to Goethe’s poem in his Zahme Xenien, turning in feigned horror from elephant-headed deities.327

  • 328 Indische Bibliothek, I, 28-96.
  • 329 Ibid., 31.

158Many of the ideas in the periodical were not new; at most their addressee had changed. One finds Schlegel in the Indische Bibliothek returning quite openly to what, for want of a better name, one could call Romantic preoccupations: mythology and translation. His conspectus of Indian poetry328 is nothing less than a call for a return to origins, to the oldest texts (as he saw them), to deepest time, to the common source of mythology and poetry, to that moment when they were one and the same; where, with all peoples and all religions of all ages and climes, nature was mirrored in the human spirit, expressing basic human needs, intimations and strivings.329

  • 330 Ibid., 235-242.
  • 331 Ibid., 400-425.
  • 332 Ibid., 32f.
  • 333 Ibid., 50-96.
  • 334 Cf. the section ‘Indische Gedichte’ in his Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (Heidelberg: M (...)
  • 335 The sections ‘Wiswamitra’s Büßungen. Eine Episode aus dem Ramajana’, ‘Der Kampf mit dem Riesen. Aus (...)

159He could also be more specific. The hypothesised spread out from an Indian ‘Ursitz’ took Schlegel back to the world of the Nibelungenlied. Did the twelfth-century Annolied, a preoccupation of his last years in Coppet, contain a reference to Germanic settlement in the Caucasus?330 Or: take the Kâwi language of Java, which showed the prehistoric transmission of Sanskrit, now of course overlayered by subsequent incursions.331 On translation, he was at first surprisingly cautious, stressing its limits and inadequacies;332 but he could not resist the opportunity of giving his readers two cantos from the Râmâyana in German hexameters. There was no question of his doing a literal translation into German of the Sanskrit classics: word-for-word translating he reserved for scholarly contexts, the Latin prose versions in his editions (Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Râmâyana) with their demonstrable complexity, without even taking into consideration the Indian metre. Hence his ‘free version’, based on Râmâyana I, xxxii-xxxv, ‘Die Herabkunft der Göttin Ganga’ [The Descent of the Goddess Ganga].333 He never repeated the experiment. It read too much like his own elegy Rom transferred to an alien cosmogony; it gave too much opportunity for the use of those accretive compounds that German shares with Sanskrit, but which require better poetic talents—Goethe’s, Klopstock’s, even Voss’s—to carry them off. There are too many linguistic echoes of Christian mythology (Klopstock again). Clearly he could still write hexameters, but enough was enough. Perhaps Friedrich Schlegel had had the right idea back in 1808,334 with his less metrically severe versions, or Friedrich Windischmann in 1816.335

160It was different when in 1827, in the pages of the Indische Bibliothek, Wilhelm von Humboldt presumed to call into question the very notion of translation itself. Humboldt, even as Schlegel was embarking on his Shakespeare, had always been sceptical on the subject. Hemsterhuis, Schlegel’s philosophical mentor in those days, had not been encouraging, either. Schlegel writes:

  • 336 Indische Bibliothek, II, 254f. Reprinted in Hans Joachim Störig (ed.), Das Problem des Übersetzens, (...)

For all that I did not allow myself to be frightened off: I tried all manner of things: Dante, Shakespeare, Calderón, Ariosto, Petrarch, Camões etc., also some poets of classical antiquity. I could now say that after all these labours I have come to the conviction that translation is, though freely chosen, nevertheless a laborious bondage, an art without sustenance, a thankless craft; thankless, not just because the best translation is never esteemed as equal to an original, but also because the translator, the more he gains insight, must feel even more the inevitable imperfection of his work. But I will rather emphasise the other side. The true translator, one could state boldly, who is able to render not just the content of a masterpiece, but also to preserve its noble form, its peculiar idiom, is a herald of genius who, over and beyond the narrow confines set by the separation of language, spreads abroad its fame and broadcasts its high gifts. He is a messenger from nation to nation, who mediates mutual respect and admiration, where otherwise all is indifference or even enmity.336

  • 337 Quarterly Review (1831), 5.
  • 338 Oeuvres, III, 183.

161These are dignified and noble words that may stand as a monument to his Romantic achievement and his continuing sense that it was good. Their spirit could also be applied to the Sanskrit editions, although the letter—in Latin—was different. For by the time Schlegel was next to dilate on the subject of translation—in his published letter to Sir James Mackintosh of 1832—he had an axe to grind and ventured into controversial territory. He had not been pleased with the policy of the Oriental Translation Committee of the Royal Asiatic Society, indeed riled at the centrality of Persian and Arabic texts, not Sanskrit, in their prospectus. Once, over a generation ago, the actual edition of the text to be translated had not exercised him greatly (Bell’s Shakespeare, instead of the more authoritative Johnson-Steevens, for instance), but solely the end result. With Sanskrit texts, it was different. One could not approach this task without the requisite ‘philologie asiatique’, and Schlegel proceeded to set out what in his view that involved. It was essentially a statement of what he had been doing since 1818. ‘Fervour and enthusiasm’,337 which sufficed for the author of the article in the Quarterly Review in 1831, were not enough. The means of acquisition of Sanskrit by the British—’in the field’, at the feet of pandits—was not always an absolutely reliable basis for translation as Schlegel envisaged it. The British would need to set up Sanskrit studies on a footing commensurate with their European counterparts.338

Paris and London 1820-1823

  • 339 Briefe, I, 378f.
  • 340 Indische Bibliothek, II, 45f. ; also Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Praef., xiif.
  • 341 Indische Bibliothek, I, i, 97-128.
  • 342 Briefe, I, 387f.

162The first fruits of Schlegel’s Sanskrit studies were the two visits, to Paris in 1820‑21, and to London in 1823, the fulfilment of the confidence and generosity vested in him by the Prussian government, and concretely, the 2,000 talers that Hardenberg had authorized.339 His Indische Bibliothek had already started to appear in 1820. It could not however reproduce satisfactorily Sanskrit characters, which a learned Asiatic journal must be able to do, at least to Schlegel’s specifications and satisfaction. Lithography would not suffice: the hapless Würzburg professor Othmar Frank, who had produced a lithographed chrestomathy of ancient Indian texts, received very short shrift indeed.340 Franz Bopp had been able to use the London press set up by Charles Wilkins for his edition of Nalus in 1819, a fact that Schlegel was obliged to mention. But not without due words in season:341 charity among the new Sanskritists in Germany did not come easily, it seems, Schlegel elsewhere complaining that Bopp gave himself airs,342 Bopp claiming the same of Schlegel, Schlegel for good measure concluding his Indische Bibliothek in 1830 with a severe critique (by Lassen) of Bopp’s Sanskrit grammar. And this was to be but one controversy among several.

  • 343 Krisenjahre, II, 365f.; Czapla/Schankweiler, 32.
  • 344 For most of what follows see W. Kirfel, ‘Die Anfänge des Sanskrit-Druckes in Europa’, Zentralblatt (...)

163More importantly, the editions of Sanskrit texts promised severally to Hardenberg, to Altenstein, to Solms, to Schulze, to Rehfues, needed a devanagari typeface. Paris was the only place in Europe that possessed the necessary technology. Thus Schlegel spent eight months in the royal capital, not only straining his eyes over manuscript variants of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ (to appear in 1823),343 but also acquiring the practical skills of a type-founder and compositor—of Sanskrit.344

  • 345 Indische Bibliothek, I, 22.
  • 346 Ibid., 97.

164Schlegel rightly saw himself as a pioneer in this technique—he used the analogy with the Italian Renaissance printers who had set up the first Byzantine Greek texts345—not completely without predecessors, of course. Charles Wilkins’s Grammar of the Sanskrita Language, for instance, had been published in London in 1808, using it;346 Wilkins, similarly, had produced an edition of the Hitopadeśa in London in 1810, the first Indian textual edition in Europe. These were the two main factors spurring Schlegel on in this endeavour, both of equal rank in importance: pride that a German (Prussian) university now had a printing facility that the English had only privately, and that the French, for all their university chairs of oriental languages, did not have at all; and satisfaction at having designed the type, the one that he wanted and that was appropriate for reproducing the ‘sacred’ originals.

  • 347 Paris address list SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XI, IVb.
  • 348 Briefe, I, 380.
  • 349 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (18) 89. Abel-Rémusat’s letters to AWS ibid., 87-99.
  • 350 ‘M. Fauriel’, in Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, ed. Michel Brix (Paris  (...)
  • 351 Indische Bibliothek, I, 368-370; technical description II, 36f.
  • 352 Bonn UB, S 1435.
  • 353 There follow a further 12 lines of title page. (Lutetiae Parisiorum: Crapelet, 1821).
  • 354 Rehfues to Schlegel 26 April 1822, in: Kirfel (1915), 278.
  • 355 The Journal Asiatique prints a letter from Altenstein authorizing the Sanskrit press to be placed a (...)
  • 356 SLUB Dresden, Mscr.Dresd. e. 90. XI, I, 4.
  • 357 Krisenjahre, II, 421.

165Being back in Paris347 after an absence of little more than two years restored him to the Staël-Broglie family, renewed contact with Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt (who praised the essay on the elephant).348 He also needed to consult his booksellers and publishers Treuttel & Würtz over sales. (Was there time to visit Madame Récamier, whose address he had?) He certainly did have time to visit the studio of Baron François Pascal Gérard, in order to arrange for his niece Auguste von Buttlar to work there. It brought him back into the world of French oriental studies, to Silvestre de Sacy, to the young sinologist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat—in 1823 Rémusat would congratulate him on his appointment as a corresponding member of the Société Asiatique349—and to his former mentor Chézy. There were copies of the Indische Bibliothek to give away. But the hypochondriac Chézy was moody and unhelpful, refusing him access to a manuscript of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, a foretaste of that later carping critique of Schlegel’s edition for which he used a front-man, Langlois. It was in fact the scholar Claude- Charles Fauriel, the celebrated translator of popular Greek songs, also an acquaintance from Staël days, who made himself most useful, being flattered with the address of ‘pandita’ and the assurance that Vishnu would reward his efforts.350 Schlegel produced drawings, based on Paris manuscripts, of the letters he required, of the right size and clarity. He entrusted these to the engraver Vibert at the Didot printers, who cut them and had them cast by the Lion letter-foundry.351 We have detailed instructions to the printer, in French and German, about type sizes, about ligatures and other technical matters.352 The first trial of this type was only a few pages long, but it bore the resounding title Specimen novae typographiae Indicae,353 with ‘curavit Aug. Guil. Schlegel’ as a reminder of whose intellectual property it was. It was this press which Schlegel later had installed in the rear part of his house, when he and Lassen oversaw the devanagari sections of his editions and the Indische Bibliothek. Having footed the bill, the Prussian authorities also wanted the press to be available to Bopp in Berlin:354 Schlegel could only acquiesce, however unwillingly. It gave him greater satisfaction when the French asked permission to use it.355 The visit to London was equally important, but for different reasons. To the British customs authorities at Dover we owe the only surviving official description of Schlegel: ‘five feet six inches; grey hair; fresh complexion; grey eyes’.356 He had crossed by steam packet, without being seasick.357

Fig. 29 Schlegel’s Certificate of Departure from the Port of Dover, 19 November 1823, with description of his appearance.

Fig. 29 Schlegel’s Certificate of Departure from the Port of Dover, 19 November 1823, with description of his appearance.

© SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.

  • 358 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, II, 17.
  • 359 Briefe, I, 392f.
  • 360 Ibid., 405.
  • 361 Ibid., 393.

166If the Courier de Londres of 4 November 1823 expressed his distinction primarily in terms of his famous Lectures, it did go on to say that he was ‘at present one of the orientalists of the first rank in Europe’.358 It did not mention that he was accompanied by Christian Lassen, his pupil and amanuensis, for whom Schlegel had secured a travelling scholarship from the Prussian government and whose task was to compare manuscripts of the Râmâyana and the Hitopadeśa for the editions that Schlegel was planning. It was to involve both Schlegel and Lassen in more than they bargained for. The presentation copies of the Indische Bibliothek listed on their title page all of his decorations and memberships of learned societies. If most of these were in respect of an earlier existence, surely nobody noticed. There had not been time to add the honorary membership of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta;359 the Prussian Red Eagle would not follow until 1824.360 As a corresponding member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London he was able to attend the annual general meeting at its foundation late in 1823. To the older Asiatic Society he could express himself: ‘the printing of Sanskrit is being done under my eyes on the banks of the Rhine as on those of the Ganges’, and warming to his theme, ‘the comparative study of languages cuts across the limits of history and enables us to know where peoples belong, and their migrations. The venerable religion, the law-giving, the mythology of the Brahmins touches at a thousand points the history of civilization in the ancient world’.361

  • 362 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, II, 57.
  • 363 Cf. Norman King, ‘Lettres de Madame de Staël à Sir James Mackintosh’, Cahiers staëliens, 10 (1970), (...)
  • 364 Krisenjahre, II, 421.
  • 365 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX, 15 (21).
  • 366 Ibid. (6).
  • 367 Râmâyana, Praefatio, xlvii.
  • 368 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XLIX (21).

167Whereas his domestic needs in Paris were served in the Broglie house in the rue de l’Université, in London he had to find lodgings: 14 Leicester Square was certainly central, but quite a step from the British Museum (where a new wing was being added to accommodate the Elgin Marbles) and even farther from the East India Company Library in Leadenhall Street. Nevertheless he was feted and fussed over more than ever in his career. Doubtless the visit to England of Auguste de Staël and Victor de Broglie earlier in the year, although concerned with institutions (agronomy),362 revived links with names from the Staël days. Sir James Mackintosh, who had been sending him Indian books since 1816,363 was away in the country, but his name was an entrée to the right circles.364 Mackintosh too had long since recognized that Schlegel had philological accomplishments ‘which our Anglo Indians cannot possess’.365 Mackintosh was able to arrange for his proper reception in Oxford:366 amid the Augean stable of the Bodleian’s oriental manuscripts he spotted a fragment of the Râmâyana.367 James Cowles Prichard came over from Bristol to meet him.368

  • 369 For much of which follows see the informative edition by Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher, Founders of (...)
  • 370 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (14), 14.
  • 371 Râmâyana, I, i, 161; SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (15), 68; Rocher and Rocher (2013), 88f.

168Other Staëlian connections would prove useful: one was Sir Humphry Davy, now president of the Royal Society; Sir John Malcolm, general, ambassador and administrator, who took him to Cambridge; Sir Alexander Johnston, who had held highest administrative positions in Ceylon and whom Auguste de Staël had met, used his good offices.369 Doors were opened, facilities granted, so that this now famous scholar could consult the holdings of the East India Company and the British Museum (where his fellow-countryman Georg Heinrich Noehden made himself useful). Davy and Johnston received Auguste von Buttlar and doubtless helped her to gain portrait commissions among the high aristocracy: there was a portrait of a Brougham child; the duchesses of Kent and Clarence asked to see her prices. There must have been a visit to John Flaxman, the object of Schlegel’s enthusiasm twenty-five years earlier, for he advised Auguste not to overcharge.370 Edward Moor, whose Hindu Pantheon (1810) Schlegel was to use in the notes to his Râmâyana edition, offered to help him in assembling a collection of Indian art.371

  • 372 Rocher and Rocher (2013), 80-87.

169But the main object was to meet Henry Thomas Colebrooke.372 Although near-contemporaries, Colebrooke and Schlegelcould hardly have been more different, had not a common interest in Sanskrit brought them together. Of the second generation of high officials in the East India Company (although his father, chairman of the company, had fallen spectacularly from grace), Colebrooke was on his retirement from India in 1814 a judge and member of the Supreme Council in Calcutta, a trustee of the Fort William College as well as professor of Hindu law there, and the President of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. He was the author of a Sanskrit grammar, based on indigenous systems (1805), had edited a Sanskrit dictionary (1808), written numerous papers on astronomy, inscriptions, prosody, geography (including the headwaters of the Ganges), and had translated source works on the law of inheritance. In 1815 he had returned to London with his young family, including John Colebrooke, the Anglo-Indian son whom he had fathered and who with Patrick Johnston was to live with Schlegel in 1824-26.

  • 373 Ibid., 28; on Colebrooke see Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher, The Making of Western Indology. Henry T (...)

170Colebrooke’s interests were now more in the fields of astronomy and mathematics (subjects to which Schlegel himself was not indifferent). He was however a collector. His decision in 1819 to donate his amassed 2,000 volumes of Indian manuscripts to the East India Company Library made London overnight a centre of Sanskrit studies to throw into the shade Paris, which hitherto had the most extensive holdings. Both Othmar Frank and Franz Bopp had felt the need to come to London—before Schlegel—to consult manuscripts, and in Bopp’s case to oversee the printing of his Nalus edition.373

  • 374 Indische Bibliothek, I, 22.
  • 375 Ibid., I, 12f.

171Schlegel meanwhile had delivered a promissory note to the Prussian government in the form of a reissue of his essay on the current state of Indian philology (repeated from 1819) that had ushered in the first number of his Indische Bibliothek. That essay was much more informative and much less presumptuous than his last public statement, the review of Chézy in 1815. It had a more balanced and conciliatory attitude towards British India and efforts being fostered there to secure the preservation of the Sanskrit language, lexical, grammatical and textual, while not conceding the ‘principles of classical philology’ and their primacy.374 In this context, the name of Colebrooke received an honorific mention.375 Now, to fulfil his obligations, Schlegel needed to turn to the authority himself.

  • 376 Rocher and Rocher (2013), 29-32.
  • 377 A rare exception is his letter to the Directors of the East India Company, Oeuvres, III, 255-257.
  • 378 Rocher and Rocher (2011), 41.
  • 379 Ibid., 61.

172Schlegel’s first approach to Colebrooke thus had every reason to be deferential,376 writing in French as with all of his English-language correspondents.377 But not obsequious either: he could write that other Schlegels too had had their connections with India (Carl and Friedrich). Not knowing of Colebrooke’s own interest in these matters,378 he set out his stall as a comparative philologist, the great etymological project that never got beyond a few first beginnings. Names were dropped—Sir James Mackintosh and Thomas Campbell—and a copy of the Indische Bibliothek promised. It worked, and there ensued a correspondence in which Schlegel reported on the progress of his typographical and textual undertakings and made specific enquiries, while Colebrooke informed him on the London holdings and on the availability of manuscripts for purchase. It was Colebrooke, who on 1 August, 1822, informed Schlegel that he had been elected an honorary member of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta.379

  • 380 Briefe, I, 405-411.
  • 381 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (25), 63 (letter of Adam Sedgwick, 10 January, 1845).

173Schlegel’s letter to Johannes Schulze of 20 February, 1824,380 is therefore of considerable interest in that it records Schlegel’s impressions of England. This was an England without Madame de Staël, although that old connection had eased his way into some echelons of society. She had been interested in social and political institutions; he was concerned with these only as they affected education, or—this to Schulze—showed how much (or indeed how little) England was doing for ‘Bildung’. Restricting himself to what he actually saw, Schlegel claimed that scholarship was restricted to Oxford and Cambridge (he did not know Scotland: Mackintosh had studied at Aberdeen and Edinburgh); University College in London, in whose founding Mackintosh was closely involved, was not yet in being (it would soon be teaching both German and Sanskrit). The two ancient universities were in the 1820s unreformed, at ease with themselves, unresponsive to outward stimuli. True, one knew Latin and Greek there, but there was no real theology, philosophy or history to enhance the linguistic knowledge. A germanophile wave was about to break over Cambridge, but not yet: the polymath William Whewell, whom Schlegel met and with whom he vied in omniscience,381 was to be an early representative. Despite meeting the bookseller Bohte, Schlegel seemed unaware of the extent of translation activity from German into English. Yet he was generally right in stating that England’s primacy lay in practical subjects like mathematics, physics or mechanics (Sir Humphry Davy, who had not been to university, would bear this out).

  • 382 Leitzmann, 154.

174This was by way of impressing on Schulze the need for continuing support for the Sanskrit project, an object of pure scholarship, not of pragmatic application. Of course, England had Colebrooke, it had Wilkins, it had Haughton; between them these men covered astronomy, epic literature, and language. But (to read between the lines) the initiative lay with Germany: forty copies of his Bhagavat-Gîtâ had gone off to London for distribution, and the Râmâyana edition would not be far behind. Whereas no English university taught Sanskrit (as opposed to the East India Company’s college at Haileybury), there were now four in Prussia alone that did (Bonn, Berlin, Greifswald and Königsberg). German scholarship had but to avail itself of the resources of Paris and London. As he was to say in another context, the ideal combination would be English money and German scholarly expertise.382

  • 383 ‘De zodiaci antiquitate et origine’, Opuscula, 349.

175The letter to Schulze should not be read as belittling Schlegel’s respect for the likes of Colebrooke, his ‘vir summus’ [the very best of men]383 (Schlegel would never know as much Sanskrit as he). Indeed when in 1824 Colebrooke made the unusual suggestion that his son John go to Bonn to have his schooling placed on a firmer footing, it was a request that Schlegel did not feel in a position to refuse. Nor, one feels, would he have wished to do so, even when Sir Alexander Johnston asked if his son Patrick might join John Colebrooke.

Educating the Young

176This gesture was part of that extraordinary renewal of selfless devotion to the children of others, interrupted since the death of poor Albert de Staël. It was something that his contemporaries either did not notice or chose to overlook: the kindness extended to the young student Heinrich Heine is part of it. The first beneficiary was his niece Auguste von Buttlar, not as young as the boys, indeed already married. The only child of Ludwig Emanuel and Charlotte Ernst in Dresden, she was embarking on an artistic career, no easy task for a woman without patronage. (Her cousins by marriage, the Veit brothers, by contrast, had been to the Dresden academy and had their careers watched over assiduously by Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel.) The Schlegel family was in agreement that it disliked her husband, a former officer in Russian service; her uncles Friedrich and August Wihelm had genuine affection for her. She had visited Friedrich in Frankfurt; now it was August Wilhelm in Bonn.

  • 384 SLUB Dresden Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (3), 123.
  • 385 Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

177He spared no effort in promoting Auguste’s career and supporting her financially. It was of course useful to have an uncle who was also an art connoisseur and a critic. Knowing Baron Gérard—and writing an enthusiastic article on his painting of Corinne at Cape Miseno, one of the more famous representations of Madame de Staël—he enabled Auguste to work in the painter’s studio and to copy in the Louvre.384 (There is a pencil drawing of the Corinne by her.)385 In England, as seen, he recommended ‘Madame de Buttlar’ to his high social connections. None of her society portraits is traceable today, but we do have a fine pencil drawing of her uncle Friedrich Schlegel, the last image of him made before his death.

Fig. 30 Auguste von Buttlar, pencil drawing after the engraving by Jean Bein based on the painting by François Gérard, ‘Corinne au cap Misène’ (1819), 1824.

Fig. 30 Auguste von Buttlar, pencil drawing after the engraving by Jean Bein based on the painting by François Gérard, ‘Corinne au cap Misène’ (1819), 1824.

© Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, all rights reserved.

178Alas, Auguste became embroiled in the religious politics of the Schlegel family. In 1826, she and her husband converted to Catholicism. She had waited until the deaths of her parents, both staunchly Protestant, also knowing that they would have disinherited her had she taken such a step in their lifetime. Her uncle, too, had proprietary claims, writing to her in pained anger:

  • 386 Briefe, I, 461.

How gladly would I have been a father to you, dear niece, but you have placed yourself beyond my reach, have turned against me. If you can turn again, to join the sacred memory of your parents, of your venerable grandfather, and so many other forebears, I will receive you and your children with open arms.386

  • 387 Kaufmann, ‘Zur Erinnerung’, 246f.; Deetjen, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel in Bonn’, 18.

179He accused his brother Friedrich of leading her astray, indeed all of these remarks were intended for his hearing in distant Vienna. One can discern nothing in these years that shows Schlegel returning to the substance of the family’s Protestantism; he was of course still interested in the phenomenon of religion and its association with myth and culture, but not in doctrinal matters. One must conclude that his anti-Catholic stance was not without its element of ancestor-worship, with him as the guardian of the family flame. It was part of his growing detestation of converts and clericalism in general.387 On the other hand, the increasingly apocalyptic tone of Friedrich’s late lectures was an embarrassment to him and led to vigorous denials of the ‘taint’ of Catholicism.

180If Schlegel could not pardon Friedrich, at least he forgave Auguste. Widowed and with a child, she became a frequent guest at the Sandkaule and in 1845 a major beneficiary of her uncle’s will. She later deposited his collection of Indian miniature paintings in the Dresden gallery, the only art works from his house in Bonn that are readily identifiable today.

  • 388 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (23), 100.
  • 389 Czapla/Schankweiler, 165f.

181Already in 1823 his brother Moritz had written to him asking for advice in placing his son Johann August Adolph Schlegel.388 This nephew seemed to be the son that Schlegel might have wished for. He had studied classics at Göttingen and was set on a career as a ‘Philologe’ (a teacher of Greek and Latin),389 thus the preserver of the male Schlegel line in every respect. His uncle could do nothing for him at this stage; later, when old and infirm, he had to accept responsibility for his nephew, who was by then mentally ill.

182Would the care of others’ children, outside of the family, produce less heartache? This too was not to be free of sorrow, but in the short term all went well. John Colebrooke and Patrick Johnston were in a sense living links with India and its high administration (John of mixed parentage). John’s ancestry excluded him from East India Company service (there was talk of the Cape bar), but Patrick could aspire to it. Henry Colebrooke and Schlegel shared similarly stringent educational principles: mathematics and Latin as the base, with the full range of subjects offered by the German Gymnasium. The unreformed, pre-Arnoldian English public school—John had been at Charterhouse and Patrick at Eton—was in every respect deficient. German pedagogy would make up for English laxities.

  • 390 A testimonial for him by AWS in SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XX (1), 4.

183It was all set up on a proper and businesslike basis, with accounts of expenses presented and approved. Needless to say it required of Schlegel time and energy, in the year that he was also rector of the university. Christian Lassen, whom Schlegel had left in London to work on the manuscripts in East India House, had to interrupt his researches to bring the boys over. They meant extra work for his housekeeper Marie. A tutor had to be found for them, Johann Nicolaus Bach, a pupil of Schlegel’s,390 who was to get them up to the required standard—in mathematics, the classics, history, geography, French (French was spoken at the dinner table, doubtless a daunting and formidable experience for the fifteen-year-olds). Their social attainments were not overlooked: there were fencing and dancing lessons; a touch of Pestalozzi saw them learning to ride and swim. There were echoes of Schlegel’s and Albert’s excursions when they went on a walking tour with their tutor up the Rhine as far as Mainz and the Rheingau. Paternal ‘encouragement’, admonition even, was not lacking. Schlegel was able to observe what the German school system could do for two English boys of the right aptitude, background—and means. They had arrived shy and retiring (no wonder) and had become outgoing, healthy, scholastically inclined even.

184Yet this ‘Pedagogical Province’ on the Rhine ended as abruptly as it began. On 13 May, 1826, letters arrived from Colebrooke and Johnston recalling both boys with immediate effect. No reason was given for the termination, except that Patrick was to take the examinations for Haileybury, the East India Company college, John to study at a Scottish university. Schlegel remained on good terms with both fathers until 1828‑29, when the correspondence ceased; there were polite letters from each boy, doubtless paternally inspired. Poor John Colebrooke had only a year to live. Late in 1827 he was found dead in a Paris hotel. He had taken cyanide. Still young and inexperienced, he had contracted debts and in his own eyes had compromised and disgraced the family.

  • 391 Rocher and Rocher (2013), 179, 181.

185Schlegel had, as he said, ‘paternal affection’ for John and had wept on receiving the news.391 He had lost Auguste Böhmer and Albert de Staël: Auguste von Buttlar was effectively lost through her ‘defection’; Auguste de Staël had died in 1827. Now John Colebrooke was gone. He would not lose Christian Lassen.

  • 392 Kirfel, 22.
  • 393 Ibid., 29.
  • 394 Ibid., 87f.

186The young Norwegian was quite a different proposition. For a start he was Schlegel’s best pupil in Sanskrit, in a sense therefore his intellectual and academic son. Schlegel used the phrase ‘fatherly concern’,392 but their correspondence suggests that, as a real father, he would have been fairly demanding, if not overbearing. There were exhortations to thriftiness, Schlegel reminding him that he too had once been a tutor and had known strict ‘Oeconomie’.393 Lassen spent from the autumn of 1823 until May, 1825 in London, the rest of 1825 until the spring of 1826 in Paris, on the scholarship that Schlegel had secured for him. Should further encouragement be necessary, Schlegel told Lassen that it was for his sake and for the furtherance and future of Sanskrit studies that he had pulled strings, taken on the rectorship, written that Latin ode on the king’s steamship junket (of which he was proud nevertheless). He encouraged Lassen to diversify,394 to take advantage of whatever foreign countries could offer (especially France), and to cultivate social graces (‘Weltton’).

  • 395 Râmâyana, Praef., lxixf.
  • 396 Burnouf, 2.

187That was all very well, given that Lassen was doing the donkey work for Schlegel’s editions: the Râmâyana had appeared with only Schlegel’s name on the title page (Lassen is thanked in the preface);395 in the Hitopadeśa his role is acknowledged. Back in Bonn he would be helping with the devanagari press, and his presence was required at table with the young Englishmen. He could not move in the same circles as Schlegel in London and was living with the German bookseller Bohte. His views on England and the English were if anything even less flattering than Schlegel’s. In Paris, he was caught up in the factions there, with Chézy being unhelpful and obstructive, until Chézy’s pupil Burnouf smoothed things over and received him as Schlegel’s protégé and ‘mon cher fellow student’.396

  • 397 Essai sur le pali […] par E. Burnouf et Chr. Lassen (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1826).
  • 398 Information in the Index praelectionum.

188Schlegel also had very clear ideas about Lassen’s career: doctorate, ‘Habilitation’, and chair. Missives went off at any sign of seeming unpunctuality. He had to do his master’s bidding; it was he who wielded the critical hatchet on Bopp in the last number of the Indische Bibliothek. While Lassen duly completed his doctorate and fulfilled all the remaining plans of his fatherly mentor, including a chair in 1840, he also developed enough independence of mind and resilience: his first piece of important scholarship was completed with Burnouf in Paris.397 His lectures in Bonn— he is listed as a ‘professor extraordinarius’ from the summer of 1831, a full professor from the winter of 1841‑42398—suggested that he took much of the burden of teaching elementary Sanskrit off Schlegel’s shoulders but also complemented and extended his master’s range both in Indian literature and Persian. Apart from those courses on English literature that he gave on the side, Lassen’s lectures suggested that oriental studies in Bonn now reflected a professional specialism, not Schlegel’s universal approach to knowledge.

  • 399 Kirfel, 204.
  • 400 Ibid., 229. The section from Bonn to Cologne was completed in 1844.

189Nevertheless theirs is an important correspondence (Schlegel’s letters mainly) that tells us of domestic arrangements, the visits to Berlin, Paris and London, Schlegel’s larger and smaller vanities, and even the march of technological progress. For if the king’s steamboat trip in 1825 had been a sensation, by 1827 a steamer took one to Mainz and back in seven hours.399 In 1840, a railway was announced for Bonn.400

Paris and London Again

  • 401 Ibid., 218.
  • 402 Ibid., 209.
  • 403 SLUB Dresden. Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX, 4 (3), 1. Letter of 21 December 1832 (they had seen Marion D (...)
  • 404 Addresses and invitations SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XI, V. B.

190It was ultimately Indian matters that took Schlegel again to Paris and London in 1831-32. Leaving Lassen in charge of the proofs of the Râmâyana, he was absent in Paris from September 1831 until March 1832, comparing manuscripts of the third editorial project, the Hitopadeśa. When not doing this, or when not socially engaged, he was translating into French the lectures that he hoped to deliver in London.401 He had escaped the cholera that was ravaging Germany (Hegel was its most prominent victim): his letters from Lassen had been soaked in vinegar by the French border authorities.402 It was doubtless agreeable to find Chézy in a good frame of mind, or to meet again the ever-friendly Burnouf. Above all, he renewed his links with the Broglie family: the children, Albert and Pauline, were growing up, and he showed an interest in their education. He took a particular shine to Albert, even going to the theatre with him to see the latest play by Victor Hugo.403 He was sufficiently well-known to be invited by the Prussian ambassador, by Baron Rothschild, by Guizot, but one senses that Broglie influence may have been behind the invitation to the minister of the interior, Casimir-Périer.404

  • 405 Indische Bibliothek, II, 68.
  • 406 List of subscribers in a letter to Treuttel & Würtz 1828. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (27 (...)
  • 407 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XI, V. B.
  • 408 Briefe, I, 497f.
  • 409 Kirfel, 214f.

191Schlegel had noted in the Indische Bibliothek in 1827 that the duke of Orleans was the patron of the French Société Asiatique.405 In that capacity, the duke had also subscribed to the Râmâyana.406 Since the July Revolution of 1830, the duke was now King Louis-Philippe. It was therefore extremely gratifying for Schlegel to receive an invitation to dine at the Tuileries Palace on 8 October, 1831 (‘gentlemen to wear uniforms’).407 Full of pride he could report to Altenstein that he had received the Légion d’honneur, had been presented at court, and had walked arm in arm with the king in deep conversation.408 His detractors might claim that Victor de Broglie, as a minister of state, had orchestrated all this, but Schlegel could count on the king’s interest when he sent his Indian writings to him.409

  • 410 hat entsetzlich viel gekostet’. Lohner, 210.
  • 411 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, II, 51.
  • 412 Ibid., XIX (29), 13.
  • 413 Oeuvres, III, 311.

192The new chevalier was to be showered with invitations and honours during his stay in London, which followed in March and April. Evidently he chose to live in style:410 lodging in the Brunswick Hotel, enjoying oysters and sherry, purchasing a razor from suppliers to his Majesty or a hat from the Duke of Cumberland’s ‘hatter, hosier & glover’.411 Le tout of London received him: the Duke of Sussex at Kensington Palace (as President of the Royal Society and the only royal duke remotely interested in things of the mind), Lord Munster (as President of the Royal Asiatic Society), Lord Lansdowne (an old friend of the Staëls); Prince Talleyrand, languishing in ‘exile’ as ambassador, had him to dinner, as did the Duke of Wellington (another old Staël connection).412 The Athenaeum, The Royal Society of Literature, the Geographical Society, the Royal Institution all welcomed him. If Henry Colebrooke was too indisposed to see him, at least Sir James Mackintosh had him to breakfast; he met Charles Wilkins; Colonel Tod was absent, but he saw his collection of coins (the Bactrian Greek ones that so interested him);413 Sir Alexander Johnston entertained him at the Asiatic Society Club.

Fig. 31 Schlegel’s invitation to the palace of the Tuileries, dated 8 October, 1831.

Fig. 31 Schlegel’s invitation to the palace of the Tuileries, dated 8 October, 1831.

© SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.

Fig. 32 Schlegel’s receipt for the ‘Silver Dress Star of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order’, 20 March, 1832.

Fig. 32 Schlegel’s receipt for the ‘Silver Dress Star of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order’, 20 March, 1832.

© SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.

  • 414 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (10), 42.
  • 415 Körner, ‘Indologie und Humanität’, 160; Bhatti, ‘Indienrezeption’, 201.
  • 416 Körner, 159.

193One invitation stands out: Sir John Herschel suggested that it might ‘not be disagreeable’ for him to come to his house near Slough to meet ‘the Rajah Ram Ramoham Roy’ [sic].414 Schlegel mentions the meeting with Rammohan Roy but once—he refers to him as ‘Râma‑mohanaraya’—in a late letter to Rehfues.415 There he calls him ‘the most enlightened of all Brahmins’, gratified at Western interest in Indian wisdom and poetry. The symbolism of that encounter would emerge only later: the religious, educational and social reformer, the ‘Maker’, the ‘Father’ of modern India, with the ‘father’ of German Indology. The context of Schlegel’s recollection is however significant: his continuing interest in and concern at British policies in India, not least their insensitivities, the ‘fanaticism’ of missionaries towards local religious beliefs, of whatever kind. It was part of his indignation at Parliament’s renewal of the East India Company’s privileges, that ‘golden colossus with feet of clay’.416

  • 417 Briefe, I, 500f.
  • 418 Ibid., II, 227.

194Schlegel meanwhile was received by King William IV, presenting the king with his Sanskrit works and alluding deferentially to the monarch’s protective sceptre extended over his Asiatic subjects. He reminded William too that he was the son of Johann Adolf Schlegel, who had received preferment from King George III, ‘of glorious memory’.417 He was invested with the silver star of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order,418 another ribbon to stick on his coat.

  • 419 Kirfel, 217.
  • 420 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (15), 95 (Lord Munster), ibid., 12 (Mackintosh).
  • 421 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (15), 19.
  • 422 The account of what follows set out in Rocher and Rocher (2013), 165f.
  • 423 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (15), 13.

195One would have expected his bliss to be complete. But he did not like England or the English (‘the most banausic of people’),419 despite the outward splendour of their institutions. Lord Munster had to tell him that there was more interest in the Reform Bill than in Asiatic antiquities, Sir James Mackintosh averring optimistically that ‘The general Indifference of our Public to all Subjects but one will doubtless be conquered by your Genius & your Fame’.420 Above all, nothing went according to his wishes or expectations. It was fine to be invited to the general meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society,421 but less agreeable to find that library opening hours were not as generous as in Bonn (or Paris): he could not pull rank with professorial privilege. Having been treated with due courtesy by German publishers, he found himself let down by none other than John Murray in London.422 It was all very well for Sir James Mackintosh to write disdainfully about a ‘vile trader in Books’;423 these people knew what would really sell, and acted accordingly.

  • 424 Letter of 29 Sept 1817, Murray Archive Ms. 40165, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland.
  • 425 Briefe, I, 632.
  • 426 To Rehfues (undated) UB Bonn S 1392.
  • 427 Thomas Campbell less flattering. Campbell, I, 362.
  • 428 Correspondence AWS to Murray, 9 Nov., 1831, 6 March and 2 April, 1832. AWS’s manuscript received by (...)

196It was not Schlegel’s first encounter with British publishers. His Vienna Lectures, as translated by John Black, were out of his hands and brought in no payment, but Murray had published his last political pamphlet in 1814. He and Auguste had had in 1817 to reject Murray’s proposals for an ‘ephemeral’ and unauthorized biography of Madame de Staël.424 In 1825 John Lockhart had written on Murray’s behalf to invite Schlegel to contribute to the Quarterly Review (nothing came of this).425 The idea of Schlegel giving lectures in London went back certainly to 1829, when Sir James Mackintosh and Henry Brougham invited him to deliver a series, in either French or English, at the institution they had co-founded: University College in London. It was this highly flattering invitation which Schlegel had quoted at Rehfues as an instance of his international esteem: ‘any branch of literature most suited to your own taste’, wrote Brougham; ‘higher Criticism of German literature’, were Mackintosh’s words.426 By 1831 the subject had been narrowed down to Indian literature, and the chosen language was to be French: the ever-punctilious Schlegel, although manifestly fluent and idiomatic in English,427 may have been afraid of compromising himself. The lectures were to be framed in the form of a letter to Sir James Mackintosh, in which he set out his criteria and principles for the study of Sanskrit. Murray blew hot and cold, until the idea of public lectures and their publication was quietly dropped.428 In fairness to Murray and Mackintosh, it is hard to imagine lectures by a German professor, delivered in French, drawing in crowds in the year of the Reform Bill, with so many of his potential audience politically engaged. His lectures would have to be dressed up differently if he were to compete with the former successes of Humphry Davy or Coleridge—or even his own minor triumph in Berlin.

197In the event Schlegel published his text both in Bonn and Paris, but not in London. These Réflexions sur l’étude des langages asiatiques, with their pronounced views on translation from Sanskrit and the tools needed for its acquisition, while impeccable in their recommendations and seeking to exhort British Sanskritists to even greater things, were nevertheless not without their element of hectoring and stridency. Perhaps Schlegel’s approach was the right one—it surely was—and academically the British were lagging behind. But did one say this in public and over the name of the now deceased Sir James Mackintosh, to whom Schlegel had been indebted since the days of Madame de Staël?

198Nevertheless it is one of the important statements on Sanskrit that Böcking chose to republish. By contrast his essay De l’Origine des Hindous, which was brought out in 1833 by the Royal Society of Literature and subsequently republished, would not tell British experts much that they did not know already (or what he had already written himself), and they may have found his anti-Celtic animadversions tiresome, or just plain wrong.

  • 429 See Rocher and Rocher (2013), 167 and sources quoted there.

199But that letter to Sir James Mackintosh had an appendix. Another source of displeasure had been the filling of the Oxford chair of Sanskrit, the newly created Boden professorship.429 It was flattering to be consulted over potential appointees: he saw the young Friedrich Rosen, a pupil of Bopp’s recently appointed to University College, as a suitable candidate, but in unreformed Oxford (as opposed to the godless institution in London), one had to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Schlegel would really have preferred Graves Chamney Haughton, but he withdrew in favour of H.

  • 430 They subscribed to just ten copies. Oeuvres, III, 257.
  • 431 ‘Eh, monsieur, si je n’avais pas honte de parler des sacrifices pécuniaires que j’ai faits pour fac (...)

200H. Wilson. This was the same Wilson who, in order to pre-empt Rosen’s possible candidature, had presumed to make disparaging remarks about continental orientalists and their acquisition of Sanskrit ‘at second hand’ (that is, not in India). This caused Schlegel to mount a very high horse indeed, in his general and specific—and public—attack on English academic Sanskrit as practised at the University of Oxford. ‘We no longer consult pandits’, Wilson would be told; the seat of ‘historical and critical philology’ was in Europe. The tone was unfortunate. Schlegel overreacted: there was no restraining hand to tell him to play it all down. It brought out prejudices and grievances, a clear failure (or unwillingness) on his part to understand the Oxford collegiate system, unjustified resentment at the East India Company and Haileybury: he had hoped, without any basis for these hopes, for generous subscriptions to his Hitopadeśa and they had not materialised.430 All this was compounded by the thought that his Sanskrit editions were not going to pay for themselves, with most of the expenses coming from his own pocket.431 There may have been more than a touch of anti-clericalism in his remarks: Wilson’s referees seemed to be clergymen. Whatever, there is an abrasiveness of tone paralleled by the satirical verse that he had been writing at the time, none of it good and none of it worthy of him or his intended victims.

The Sanskrit Editions

  • 432 Bhagavad-Gita, id est ΘΕΣΠΕΣΙΟΝ ΜΕΛΟΣ, sive almi Krishnae et Arjunae colloquium de rebus divinis, B (...)
  • 433 Bhagavat-Gîtâ, Praef., vii.

201It was the Sanskrit editions that were, in his eyes, the crowning achievement. When he spoke of Sanskrit, these were the authorities to which he need point. The biographer cannot be concerned with the technical detail of these editions—the business of experts—but with their significance in the scheme of Schlegel’s Indian endeavours. Certainly, in a notional Bibliotheca Schlegeliana, a collection of everything that he wrote, they would bulk large: hefty quarto volumes, one of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, three of Râmâyana, and two of Hitopadeśa.432 They are a fulfilment of all the promises made to and by Schlegel after his arrival in Bonn, the earnest of the confidence placed in him by Hardenberg, by Altenstein, and so many others (the Bhagavad-Gîtâ is in fact dedicated to Altenstein, and its preface stresses ‘Regia munificentia’).433

Fig. 33 Râmâyana. Schlegel’s edition, part 1 of vol. 1 (Bonn, 1829). Title page.

Fig. 33 Râmâyana. Schlegel’s edition, part 1 of vol. 1 (Bonn, 1829). Title page.

© And by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0.

  • 434 Briefe, II, 222.
  • 435 Cf. Schlegel’s report to Altenstein in 1829, Briefe, II, 212-224.

202What he says elsewhere in learned asides, in reviews, in letters, in footnotes, in statements of intent, in ‘advertisements’, is here given the focus of a text and a concrete application. These volumes, and the Indische Bibliothek, were what he presented to sovereigns and patrons, the evidence that here was no dilettante, here were no half-measures, but a serious scholar following the most stringent of editorial principles.434 They had been set and printed in devanagari type on the press paid for by the Prussian government and as such were models of how it was done.435

  • 436 Râmâyana […] Adverstisement (London, November, 1823), 8; Briefe, II, 213; SLUB Dresden Mscr. Dresd. (...)
  • 437 Briefe, II, 213.
  • 438 The East India College subscribed generously to AWS’s Bhagavad-Gîtâ (40 copies), because it was a u (...)
  • 439 Briefe, I, 612f. The half-title of vol. 1 of Râmâyana has ‘Rameidos Valmiceiae libri septem’.
  • 440 Indische Bibliothek, II, 141, 147; Râmâyana […] Advertisement, 1-8, ref. 7.
  • 441 Indische Bibliothek, II, 138, 146.
  • 442 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, LIII.

203They had exclusivity: the subscription to the Râmâyana was the very considerable sum of £ 4 or 28 talers per volume.436 The print-runs were correspondingly low: 200 on better paper and 200 on plain for the Râmâyana,437 200 for Hitopadeśa. Hence Schlegel’s anxieties as to the East India Company’s subscription policies, generous in the case of the former text, seemingly niggardly in respect of the latter.438 For Schlegel was paying for all this himself: ‘my Brahmins have cost me at least 30,000 francs’, he confessed ruefully to Victor de Broglie in 1844.439 Like almost everything else of Schlegel’s, the project was unable to fulfil its original ambitious design: the Râmâyana was conceived as a seven-volume edition, with a supplement (three appeared);440 its third volume lacks the Latin translation, and the whole has none of the mythological and geographical index that it promised;441 the ‘Index radicum’, the list of Sanskrit roots, to the Hitopadeśa never appeared.442 Such recognition as these editions had—and this applied to the Indische Bibliothek as well—was mainly outside Germany (for this he blamed Bopp).

  • 443 Arthur Schopenhauer, Werke in fünf Bänden, ed. Ludger Lütkehans, 5 vols and 1 supplement, Haffmanns (...)
  • 444 Bhagavad- Gîtâ. Des Erhabenen Sang, trans. Leopold von Schroeder, Religiöse Stimmen der Völker: Die (...)
  • 445 Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Praef., xxiii; Hitopadeśa, I, xvi.

204These were editions by a scholar for fellow-scholars. For those who knew Sanskrit, there was the text, established from all the manuscripts known to exist at the time and available for Schlegel to consult. For the Latinate—and who of his readers was not?—there were the learned notes, and for the non-Sanskritists (but not just for them) a translation. Sanskrit text, translation and notes together established an authority of textual reading and interpretation. Arthur Schopenhauer was such a Latinate general reader of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ,443 and an early twentieth-century translator of the same text could claim that Schlegel’s Latin version was still the best.444 The commitment to Latinity in the 1820s and 1830s was part of an older scholarly discourse; Schlegel also was in no doubt that Latin, with its constructions, its abstracts and compounds, was the appropriate vehicle into which to render the ancient and venerable language.445

  • 446 Nalus Maha-Bharati episodium. Textus Sanscritus cum interpretatione Latina et annotationibus critic (...)

205It did not call for ‘user-friendliness’, not a marked feature of nineteenth- century textual scholarship: the reader of Schlegel’s Bhagavad-Gîtâ was faced with Sanskrit text, then notes, then the translation itself (Bopp’s Nalus, by contrast, printed the Latin translation beneath the Sanskrit text, but ‘Boppius’, about whose Latin Schlegel and Lassen were dismissive, had done a literal version, altogether lacking Schlegel’s sense of style).446 The Râmâyana edition by contrast had footnotes to the Latin translation.

  • 447 Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Praef., xxvi, Adnott., 126.
  • 448 Ibid., Praef., xxvi.
  • 449 Ueber die unter dem Namen Bhagavad-Gita bekannte Episode des Maha-Bharata’ (1825-26).
  • 450 Râmâyana […] Advertisement (London, November 1823), 1-8. The same in French and German in Indische (...)
  • 451 Advertisement, refs 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

206Schlegel had of course never intended it to be other than hard going, and his priorities make this clear. A scholarly edition proceeded from the primacy of and respect for the text (he salutes the author of the Bhagavad- Gîtâ, acknowledges its eternal truths, and hopes that none of his readings will detract from its message).447 In this he differed markedly from his brother Friedrich (‘frater dilectissime’ ‘dearest brother’—still in 1823),448 who back in 1808 had not been able to resist speculation about the status of a perceived monotheism in the Bhagavad-Gîtâ and its relationship to the sacred writings of the Hebrews; or from Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had devoted a whole treatise to the philosophical content of the work,449 and for whom the study of Sanskrit was more than a metrical, grammatical or philological exercise. It would of course be unfair to impute this to Schlegel or reduce his labours to this one aspect only (although his correspondence with Humboldt does circle mainly around language). Yet the ‘Advertisement’ of the Râmâyana edition that Treuttel & Würtz issued for its English subscribers in 1823 made his priorities clear:450 first, ‘genuineness and correctness of the text’, the ‘duty of an editor to clear up every thing that is obscure’, then and only then remarks about the ‘classical literature of the ancient Brahmins’ and ‘ancient religion’ but also about ‘Comparative Grammar’. There follows a short description of the ancient Indian epic, not without a nod in the direction of Homer, then the technical details of the edition and its ‘typographical execution’.451

  • 452 Râmâyana, Praef., xx.
  • 453 Râmâyana, Praef., lxix.

207Staying with the Râmâyana, as the most complex of the three textual editions, we note in its preface a similar set of priorities: an account of the ancient poet Vâlmîki, but also, the oral tradition, the stages of transmission, the analogy with Homer (F. A. Wolf is the authority cited). We hear of the interpolation of episodes from older sources, the writing down of the text (on palm leaves); we learn of the language itself and its fullness and richness (‘ubertas’).452 A long section on his use of commentaries follows, then the account of his archival searches in Paris and London (and, briefly and shamefully, Oxford). Last of all he lists the names of those to whom he is indebted: Wilkins, Davy, Tod, Colebrooke, Noehden, Malcolm, Mackintosh, Johnston, Haughton, Abel-Rémusat, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, a roll-call of excellence and expertise. Before this resounding peroration of names, we find also ‘Christianus Lassen’: only he and Schlegel knew how much the edition owed to this ‘olim discipulus meus’ [former pupil of mine].453 Chézy’s name is absent.

208In a sense Schlegel wished his texts to speak for themselves, always his practice as a translator. But this was a philological exercise as well: the notes to the Râmâyana gloss points of scansion, but dilate also on matters botanical, zoological, geographical, astrological and mythological. As such the Sanskrit editions became also a focus and repository for a universal antiquarianism, an ‘omni-philology’, a tireless search to the utmost bounds of ‘science’ as understood at its fullest and most encyclopaedic.

Notes

1 For a general biographical account of Schlegel’s last years see Ruth Schirmer, August Wilhelm Schlegel und seine Zeit. Ein Bonner Leben (Bonn: Bouvier, 1986). Entertainingly written, it nevertheless needs to be taken with very considerable care. An important corrective to the standard view of the later AWS is offered by Jochen Strobel, ‘Der Romantiker als homo academicus. August Wilhelm Schlegel in der Wissenschaft’, Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts, 2010, 298-338.

2 Knight of various orders’.

3 See Josef Körner, Die Botschaft der deutschen Romantik an Europa, Schriften zur deutschen Literatur für die Görresgesellschaft, 9 (Augsburg : Filser, 1929), esp. 69-74.

4 Krisenjahre der Frühromantik. Briefe aus dem Schlegelkreis, ed. Josef Körner, 3 vols (Brno, Vienna, Leipzig : Rohrer, 1936-37 ; Berne : Francke, 1958), II, 381f.

5 Souvenirs—1785-1870—du feu duc de Broglie, 3 vols (Paris : Calmann Lévy, 1886), II, 234-247.

6 With whom Schlegel corresponded and to whom he passed on bibliographical details. Briefe von und an August Wilhelm Schlegel, ed. Josef Körner, 2 vols (Zurich, Leipzig, Vienna: Amalthea, 1930), II, 139, 230. Golbéry’s letters to AWS in SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (9), 31-39. Golbéry’s account goes into the Biographie universelle et portative […], 5 vols (Supplément) (Paris, Strasbourg : Levraut, 1834), V, 731-735, then into Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, 85 vols (Paris : Michaud, 1811-62), LXXXI, 300-316. Chetana Nagavajara, August Wilhelm Schlegel in Frankreich. Sein Anteil an der französischen Literaturkritik 1807-1835, intr. Kurt Wais, Forschungsprobleme der vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte, 3 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966), 335-338. The point is made that Jakob Minor had recourse to largely French sources when first writing up Schlegel’s life at the end of the nineteenth century.

7 Ch[arles] Galusky, ‘Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. A. W. de Schlegel’, Revue des deux mondes, 1 February 1846, 159-190, and issued separately.

8 With a few exceptions, these letters are unpublished. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (4), 1-86.

9 Published in X. Doudan, Mélanges et lettres avec une introduction par M. le comte d’Haussonville et des notices part MM. de Sacy Cuvillier-Fleury, 4 vols (Paris : Calmann Lévy, 1876), III, 1-25, 49-55, 126-128.

10 August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, 12 vols [SW] (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846-47), IX, 360-368.

11 Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

12 See Daniel Halévy, ‘La duchesse de Broglie’, Cahiers staëliens, 56 (2005), 117-167.

13 Victor’s letters SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (4), 113-136 ; Albert, ibid., 102-136 ; Pauline, 138 ; Louise, 140.

14 Oeuvres de M. Auguste-Guillaume de Schlegel écrites en français, ed. Édouard Böcking, 3 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846), I, 95f.

15 Ibid., 189-201.

16 As far as can be ascertained, AWS stayed with them in Paris. Proust’s Madame de Villeparisis claimed to have met him at the Broglie country estate. Whom do we believe ? Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 3 vols (Paris : Gallimard, 1954), II, 275.

17 Doudan, III, 9.

18 I am quoting from the copy in AWS’s papers, SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XII (1-2). There is another agreement published in Comtesse Jean de Pange, née Broglie, Auguste-Guillaume Schlegel et Madame de Staël. D’après des documents inédits (Paris : Albert, 1938), 523-525. Briefe, II, 138f.

19 Mscr. Dresd. ibid.

20 As Ueber den Charakter und die Schriften der Frau von Staël von Frau Necker gebohrne von Saussure. Uebersetzt von A. W. von Schlegel (Paris, London, Strasbourg : Treuttel & Würtz, 1820). AWS’s preface SW, VIII, 202-206.

21 Krisenjahre, III, 574f.

22 Ibid., II, 333; III, 579. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XII (6a-e). Schlegel had already placed £ 500 with the bank in 1814. Ibid. (8b).

23 SW, VII, 285.

24 Camille Pitollet, La Querelle caldéronienne de Johan Nikolas Böhl von Faber et José Joaquín de Mora reconstituée d’après les documents originaux, doctoral thesis University of Toulouse (Paris : Alcan, 1909), 136.

25 Albert Zipper, ‘Aus Odyniec’ Reisebriefen’, Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte 4 (1904), 175-187, ref. 181.

26 See generally the excellent account in Thomas G. Sauer, A. W. Schlegel’s Shakespearean Criticism in England, 1811-1846, Studien zur Literatur der Moderne, 9 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981), and here specifically 54-64.

27 Sauer, 61-64.

28 The preface states that it is adjusted to the needs of French readers. Cours de littérature dramatique. Par A.W. Schlegel. Traduit de l’Allemand, 2 vols (Paris and Geneva: Paschoud, 1814), I, v. AWS’s indignation over misapprehensions in the translation registered in undated letter to Welcker. Bonn Universitätsbibliothek, S 686 (9).

29 Cf. Cours de littérature dramatique, II, 329.

30 Cf. Black’s version of the same passage. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, by Augustus William Schlegel, 2 vols (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy; Edinburgh: William Blackwood; Dublin: John Cumming, 1815), II, 99.

31 Sauer, 100-109.

32 Ibid., 116f.

33 Ibid., 112.

34 Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and His Times, 2 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1817), II, 614. See S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 193.

35 Krisenjahre, III, 584.

36 Sauer, 81-100. The issue of Coleridge’s debt to Schlegel, which has engendered much controversy, is treated, most recently and with commendable succinctness, by Reginald Foakes, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, in: Roger Paulin (ed.), Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge, Great Shakespeareans, III (London, New York: continuum, 2010), 128-172, esp. 143-148.

37 Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, ed. William Beattie, 3 vols (London: Moxon, 1849), II, 257.

38 Ibid., 355.

39 Ibid., 363.

40 Cyrus Redding, Fifty Years’ Recollections, Literary and Personal, With Observations of Men and Things, 3 vols (London: Skeet, 1858), II, 232-234.

41 Ibid., 235.

42 Cyrus Redding, Yesterday and Today, 3 vols (London: Cautley Newby, 1863), II, 5-71, ref. 48.

43 Theodor Zeiger, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutsch-englischen Litteraturbeziehungen III: Wordsworths Stellung zur deutschen Litteratur’, in: Max Koch (ed.), Studien zur vergleichenden Litteraturgeschichte, 1 (Berlin: Duncker, 1901), 273-290.

44 Julian Charles Young, A Memoir of Charles Mayne Young, Tragedian, with Extracts from his Son’s Journal (London, New York: Macmillan, 1871), 172f.

45 Thomas Colley Grattan, Beaten Paths; and Those Who Trod Them, 2 vols (London: Chapman Hall, 1862), I, 109.

46 Young, I, 180.

47 Ibid., 174f.

48 This cannot be the place for a full discussion of Schlegel in France. This has been supplied by Chetana Nagavajara. My remarks are very much indebted to his study.

49 Such as Hugo’s borrowing of Schlegel’s distinction between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘organic’. Christian A. E. Jensen, L’Évolution du romantisme. L’année 1826 (Geneva : Droz ; Paris : Minard, 1959), 188f.

50 Jahrbücher der Literatur, VII (1819), 80-155; most accessible in: Solger’s nachgelassene Schriften und Briefwechsel, ed. Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich von Raumer, 2 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1826), II, 493-628.

51 Navagajara, 230.

52 See esp. John Isbell, ‘Présence de Coppet et romantisme libéral en France, 1822-1827’, in : Françoise Tilkin (ed.), Le Groupe de Coppet et le monde moderne : conceptions-images-débats. Actes du VIe Colloque de Coppet organisé par la Société des Études Staëliennes (Paris) et l’Association Benjamin Constant (Lausanne) Liège, 10-12 juillet 1997, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège, 277 (Geneva : Droz, 1998), 395-418.

53 Isbell (1998), 397.

54 Krisenjahre, II, 343.

55 Opuscula quae Augustus Guilelmus Schlegelius Latine scripta reliquit. Collegit et edidit Eduardus Böcking (Lipsiae : Weidmann, 1848), 385-396. See Karl August Neuhausen, ‘August Wilhelm von Schlegel in Bonn als heute vergessener lateinischer Autor : Zu seinen autobiographischen Reden—vor allem zur Selbstdarstellung als <paene Ulysses quidam> im Exil auf der Flucht vor dem Tyrannen Napoleon’, in : Uwe Baumann and Karl August Neuhausen (eds), Autobiographie : Eine interdisziplinäre Gattung zwischen klassischer Tradition und (post-)moderner Variation (Göttingen : V&R unipress, 2013), 225- 257 (with translation of the Latin text).

56 Krisenjahre, II, 390-392. On this undertaking see John Isbell, ‘Les Chefs-d’oeuvre des théâtres étrangers de Ladvocat, 1821-1823’, Cahiers staëliens, 50 (1999), 105-133.

57 Erich Schmidt, ‘Ein verschollener Aufsatz A. W. Schlegels über Goethes “Triumph der Empfindsamkeit“’, Festschrift zur Begrüßung des fünften Allgemeinen Deutschen Neuphilologentages zu Berlin Pfingsten 1892 […], ed. Julius Zupitza (Berlin : Weidmann, 1892), 77-92, ref. 83-85.

58 Isbell, 120.

59 ‘Sur Othello, traduit en vers français par M. Alfred de Vigny, et sur l’état de l’art dramatique en France en 1830 par M. le duc de B….’, Revue française (Jan. 1830), republished in François Guizot, Shakspeare et son temps. Étude littéraire (Paris: Didier, 1852), 264-313, ref. to Schlegel 306f.

60 As for instance the section ‘De la littérature dramatique chez les modernes’. Le Catholique, ouvrage périodique dans lequel on traite de l’universalité des connaissances humaines sous le point de vue de l’unité de doctrine ; publié sous la direction de M. le baron d’Eckstein (Paris : Sautelet, 1826-29), II (1826), 5-61. On Eckstein, see Louis Le Guillou, Le ‘baron’ d’Eckstein et ses contemporains […] (Paris, Champion, 2003) ; Nagavajara, 274, 281 ; Jensen, 85-90 ; Isbell (1998), 398f., 408.

61 Le Catholique, VI (1827), 531-612, ref. 607.

62 On Böhl see Carol Tully, Johann Nikolas Böhl von Faber (1770-1836). A German Romantic in Spain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007); Pitollet, La Querelle caldéronienne de Johan Nikolas Böhl von Faber; on the link with Schlegel see Guadalupe Reyes Ponce, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Wiener Vorlesungen and Böhl von Faber’s Sobre el teatro español’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 71 (1989), 105-124.

63 This letter is published by Josef Körner, ‘Johann Nikolas Böhl von Faber und August Wilhelm Schlegel’, Die neueren Sprachen 37 (1929), 53-58, ref. 53-55.

64 Pitollet, 75; Reyes Ponce, 108f.

65 Tully, 176.

66 SW, VIII, 283.

67 Körner, Botschaft, 73f.

68 Roman Koropeckyj, Adam Mickiewicz. The Life of a Romantic (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 2008), 129; Zipper, Odyniec, 180-182.

69 On Schlegel’s knowledge of the Slavs see Josef Körner, ‘Die Slawen im Urteil der deutschen Romantik’, Historische Vierteljahrschrift 31 (1937-39), 565-576.

70 Dorota Masiakowska, ‘Die Infamie der Diffamie—Zur Abwertung der Slawen bei Ernst Moritz Arndt und August Wilhelm Schlegel’, in: Hubertus Fischer (ed.), Die Kunst der Infamie. Vom Sängerkrieg zum Medienkrieg (Frankfurt am Main, etc.: Peter Lang, 2003), 169-200.

71 Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols [KA] (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna: Schöningh; Zurich: Thomas, 1958-, in progress), XXIX, 81. On the years in Frankfurt and subsequently see Harro Zimmermann, Friedrich Schlegel oder die Sehnsucht nach Deutschland (Paderborn etc.: Schöningh, 2009), 295-320.

72 George Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals, 2 vols (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1876), I, 101. References to Schlegel’s corpulence are legion.

73 KA, XXIX, 420.

74 Ibid., 370f.

75 Cf. Johannes Bobeth, Die Zeitschriften der Romantik (Leipzig: Haessel, 1911), 288.

76 First in Kunst und Alterthum. Von Goethe, 6 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1816-27), I, ii, [5]-62.

77 Ueber die Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Rom, im Frühjahr 1819, und über den gegenwärtigen Stand der deutschen Kunst in Rom’, Jahrbücher der Literatur, VII (1819), Anzeige-Blatt 1-16.

78 KA, XXIX, 367.

79 Ibid., 864f.

80 Krisenjahre, II, 318.

81 FS actually asks for between 200 and 300 florins. KA, XXIX, 519; ibid., 885 says 200.

82 Ibid., XXX, 298-300.

83 Jahrbücher der Literatur, VIII (1819), 413-468.

84 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XXVIII, 42.

85 Concordia. Eine Zeitschrift herausgegeben von Friedrich Schlegel, 6 parts (Vienna: Wallishauser, 1820, 1823).

86 Concordia, Vorrede, 1.

87 Krisenjahre, II, 342.

88 The poems known as ‘Trilogie der Leidenschaft’.

89 Briefe, II, 153.

90 On this and on the whole affair see Karl Alexander von Reichlin-Meldegg, Friedrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus und seine Zeit, nach dessen literarischem Nachlasse, bisher ungedrucktem Briefwechsel und mündlichen Mittheilungen dargestellt, 2 vols (Stuttgart : Verlags-Magazin, 1853), II, 245 (Voss), 196-213 (Schlegel and Sophie). The important cache of letters in Dresden (SLUB) and Heidelberg UB, published by Josef Körner in Briefe are a salutary corrective to Reichlin-Meldegg’s sanitized account. There is further important material in Bonn UB, Nachlass Lambertz, to which reference will be made.

91 On Jean Paul’s visits to Heidelberg and whole affair see Helmut Pfotenhauer, Jean Paul. Das Leben als Schreiben (Munich: Hanser, 2013), 369-375.

92 ‘De l’Allemagne par Mme la Baronne de Staël-Holstein’ (1814), Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe hg. von der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 31 vols in 3 sections, 1. Abt. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1927-), XVI, 297-328.

93 Ibid., 3. Abt. Briefe. 9 vols, VII, 228.

94 Walter Harich, Jean Paul (Leipzig : Haessel, 1928), 787.

95 ‘Geckerei und Glanzsucht’, Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, VII, 219.

96 Briefe, II, 329f.

97 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (23), 112.

98 Reichlin-Meldegg, II, 200.

99 Briefe, I, 336f.

100 This letter is partly published by Paul Kaufmann, ‘Auf den Spuren August Wilhelm von Schlegels’, Preußische Jahrbücher, 234 (1933), 226-243, esp. 226-234. The whole letter is in Bonn UB, Nachlass Lambertz, S 2537, Mappe II, 1-4.

101 Krisenjahre, II, 320f.

102 This letter in Briefe, I, 341f.

103 Ibid., 342f.

104 Ibid., 343-347.

105 Ibid., 343f.

106 KA, XXX, 44-47; ‘in einem kalten, hofmeisternden Tone’, 45.

107 Ibid., 89-91; ‘Unerfahrenheit’, 90.

108 Lambertz also made the same points in a letter to Paulus. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (23), 113.

109 schändliche Geschichte’, ‘Schlegelsche Sau-Geschichte’. Sulpiz Boisserée, Tagebücher 1808-1854. Im Auftrag der Stadt Köln hg. von Hans-J. Weitz, 4 vols plus index (Darmstadt: Roether, 1978-95), I, 523, 541.

110 Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, VII, 278.

111 What does the law say?’, ‘Which way shall we proceed?’. Bonn UB, Lambertz 2537, 7-10.

112 Cf. Paulus to both Lambertz and Böcking, December 1845, Briefe, II, 158.

113 Heidelberg UB, Heid. Hs. 860, 649.

114 Briefe, I, 357.

115 Cf. Sophie von Schlegel to Carl Winter 26 January, 1819. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (23), 117b.

116 The letter is published in Briefe, II, 225f.

117 KA, XXX, 250-252.

118 Ibid., 413f.

119 Briefe, I, 355.

120 Ibid., 356.

121 Friedrich v. Oppeln-Bronikowski, David Ferdinand Koreff. Serapionsbruder, Magnetiseur, Geheimrat und Dichter. Der Lebensroman eines Vergessenen (Berlin: Paetel, 1928), 331.

122 SW, I, 379.

123 It eventually became part of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829).

124 George Downes, Letters from Continental Countries, 2 vols (Dublin: Curry, 1832), II, 130f.

125 See generally Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Preußen und die Rheinlande 1815-1915’, Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 30 (1965), 152-175

126 The main sources for this section are Christian Renger, Die Gründung und Einrichtung der Universität Bonn und die Berufungspolitik des Kultusmininsters Altenstein, Academica Bonnensia, 7 (Bonn : Röhrscheid, 1982) and idem, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegels frühe Bonner Jahre’, diploma thesis University of Bonn, 1973, Bonn Universitätsarchiv Slg. Bib. 1554.

127 CF. Ludwig Petry, ‘Die Gründung der drei Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitäten Berlin, Breslau und Bonn’, in: Otto Brunner et al. (eds), Festschrift Hermann Aubin zum 80. Geburtstag, 2 vols (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1965), II, 687-709, ref. 704.

128 See Max Braubach, Die erste Bonner Hochschule. Maxische Akademie und kurfürstliche Universität 1774/77 bis 1798, Academica Bonnensia, 1 (Bonn: Bouvier, Röhrscheid, 1966).

129 Ueber Kunst und Alterthum, I, i, 36-38.

130 Alex. Kaufmann, ‘Zur Erinnerung an August Wilhelm von Schlegel’, Monatsschrift für rheinisch-westfälische Geschichtsforschung und Alterthumskunde 1 (1875), 239-254, ref. 245f.

131 See Oppeln-Bronikowsi, 90.

132 Mélanges d’histoire littéraire par Guillaume Favre avec des lettres inédites d’Auguste- Guillaume Schlegel et d’Angelo Mai receuillis par sa famille et publiés par J. Adert, 2 vols (Geneva : Ramboz & Schuchardt, 1886), I, CVII.

133 The correspondence between Koreff and AWS in Oppeln-Bronikowski, 225-236, 239, 251-253, 274-276, 325-339, 343-347, 423-426.

134 Renger (1983), 269.

135 Cf. Friedrich von Bezold, Geschichte der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität von der Gründung bis zum Jahr 1870 (Bonn : Marcus & Weber, 1920), 63.

136 Karl Th. Schäfer, Verfassungsgeschichte der Universität Bonn 1818 bis 1960. 150 Jahre Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn 1818-1968 (Bonn: Bouvier, Röhrscheid, 1968), 82f., also 387-390.

137 Ibid., 426, 453.

138 Schlegel lectured variously on Academic Study, Ancient History (up to Cyrus, up the the Fall of the Roman Empire; History of the Greeks and Romans), the History of German Language and Poetry (including the Nibelungenlied and Modern German Poetry), the History of European Literature (Italian, Spanish, French, English), the Theory and History of the Fine Arts, Greek and Latin Prosody, German Prosody and Recitation, German Grammar, Etruscan Antiquities, General History, Herodotus, Homer, Propertius, Ancient Geography, Introduction to the Study of History, Introduction to the Study of Philology; he lectured nearly every term from the summer of 1819 on Sanskrit and Indian Language and/or Literature (various titles), including Râmâyana, Bhagavat-Gîtâ and Hitopadeśa. Information on the Lectures, term by term, can be gained (for 1819-21) in Jahrbuch der Preußischen Rhein-Universität (Bonn: Weber, 1819-21), 27f., 32, 283f., 462f.; Index praelectionum auspiciis augustissimi et serenissimi regis Friderici Guilelmi III. in academia Borussica Rhenana recens condita […] publice privatimque habendarum [title varies] (Bonn: various publishers, 1818/19-1839), from 1840-41 with sub-title ‘auspiciis regis augustissimi Friderici Guilelmi IIII’; Schlegel’s ‘Inskriptionslisten seiner Zuhörer’ are a further source of information. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, V (21). Ag. 62000, 201.

139 Oppeln-Bronikowski, 330-334.

140 Ibid., 332-334.

141 Renger (1973), 46.

142 Jahrbuch, 25-33, 279-291, 445-464.

143 On Windischmann see Adolf Dyroff, Carl Jos. Windischmann (1775-1839) und sein Kreis, Görres-Gesellschaft, Erste Vereinsschrift 1916 (Cologne: Bachem, 1916), on relations with AWS, 88; Renger (1982), 187-190.

144 An Windischmann, bei Vermählung seiner Tochter. 1821’. SW, I, 378.

145 Opuscula, 415-420.

146 Bonn Universitätsbibliothek, S 686.

147 Reinhard Kekulé, Das Leben Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker’s (Leipzig : Teubner, 1880), 174, 192. See alsoAdolf Köhnken, ‘Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker :Aspekte derAltertumswissenschaft in den ersten fünfzig Jahren der Universität Bonn’, in : Heijo Klein (ed.), Bonn— Universität in der Stadt. Beiträge zum Stadtjubiläum am DIES ACADEMICUS 1989 der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Veröffentlichungen des Stadtarchivs Bonn, 48 (Bonn : Bouvier, 1990), 57-68.

148 Jahrbuch, 61-70; the same effectively by AWS in Latin, Opuscula, 418.

149 Wolfgang Menzel, Denkwürdigkeiten. Herausgegeben von dem Sohne Konrad Menzel (Bielefeld, Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1877), 137.

150 vornehme Geselligkeit’. Kekulé, Welcker, 177f.

151 Description in Kaufmann, ‘Auf den Spuren August Wilhelm von Schlegels’, 235.

152 Jahrbuch, 94-98.

153 The collection had been auctioned in 1817. Dietrich Höroldt (ed.), Bonn. Von einer französischen Bezirksstadt zur Bundeshauptstadt 1794-1989, in: idem and Manfred van Rey (eds), Geschichte der Stadt Bonn in vier Bänden, 4 (Bonn: Dümmler, 1989), 58. AWS and Welcker had recommended the purchase in December, 1818. Renger (1982), 243. The items were later destroyed. See Nikolaus Himmelmann, ‘Die Archäologie im Werk F. G. Welckers’, in: William M. Calder III et al. (eds), Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker. Werk und Wirkung […], Hermaea Einzelschriften, 49 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1986), 277-280, ref. 278. Other items were purchased for the Rheinisches Museum vaterländischer Altertümer. See Wilhelm Dorow, Opferstätte und Grabhügel der Germanen und Römer am Rhein (Wiesbaden: Schellenberg, 1826), 93. (ii-v contain AWS’s and Welcker’s expert opinion on Dorow’s excavations.)

154 Jahrbuch, 224-250.

155 Indische Bibliothek. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm von Schlegel, 2 vols (Bonn : Weber, 1820, 1827, 1830), I, 1-27 ; Bibliothèque universelle des sciences, belles-lettres, et arts […] XII: Littérature (1819), 349-370. Despite what AWS says in his preface (and despite Krisenjahre, III, 585) there was no translation in the Revue encyclopédique. There is a condensed version in Latin in the oration for Friedrich Windischmann, Opuscula, 410-414

156 Wilhelm Erman, Geschichte der Bonner Universitätsbibliothek (1818-1901), Sammlung bibliothekswissenschaftlicher Arbeiten, 37-38, II. Serie, 20-21 (Halle: Erhardt Karras, 1919), 108. Cf. also AWS’s report to Rehfues of April 1829. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (38)

157 Jahrbuch, 226f.

158 AWS gave such a lecture, but under the rubric of History, in the summer semester of 1819. Ibid., 284.

159 [Alexander Stourdza], Mémoire sur l’état actuel de l’Allemagne. Par M. de S…, conseiller d’état de S. M. I. de Toutes les Russies (Paris : Libraire Grecque-Latine-Allemande, 1818), 39, 40, 44-46.

160 Renger (1973), 50f.

161 A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on German Literature from Gottsched to Goethe Given at the University of Bonn and Taken Down by George Toynbee in 1833 […], ed. H. G. Fiedler (Oxford : Blackwell, 1944), 31.

162 ‘un mauvais sujet, et le voilà martyre’. Krisenjahre, II, 335.

163 163 Jahrbuch, 463. The Index praelectionum for the same year has ‘Lectiones suas iusto tempore continuabit’ (Bonnae: Weber, 1820-21), 7. His name is later simply dropped.

164 Kekulé, 160-163, 170; Köhnken, 59f.

165 Krisenjahre, II, 339.

166 On Rehfues see Karl Th. Schäfer, Verfassungsgeschichte der Universität Bonn, appendix by Gottfried Stein von Kaminiski, ‘Bonner Kuratoren 1818 bis 1933’, 532-537.

167 Schäfer, 23.

168 To Altenstein, Briefe, I, 362, to Schulze, 367-369.

169 Krisenjahre, II, 347f.

170 Briefe, I, 369-371.

171 Ibid., 371f.

172 Ibid., 372f.

173 Ibid., 373-377.

174 Ibid., 377.

175 die bedeutendsten Aufschlüsse für die Bildungs-Geschichte der Menschheit im Allgemeinen aus der Wiege der Cultur’. Briefe, I, 379.

176 Mainly in Bonn, Universitätsbibliothek, S 1392.

177 On all these matters see Roger Paulin, Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom, Inaugural Lecture University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), esp. 12-16.

178 Ante omnia, cives, legibus est obtemperandum’. ‘Oratio cum rectoris in universitate litteraria Bonnensi munus die XVIII. octobris anni MDCCCXXIIII. in se susciperet habita’. Opuscula, 384. Similar calls for general vigilance in: ‘Oratio natalibus Friderici Guilelmi III […]’ (1824) ; ‘Iure itaque cavetur, ne diuturna quies in desidiam delabatur’. Ibid., 365.

179 Cf. the memorandum of the Faculty of Philosophy of 16 July, 1822, to this effect. ‘Personalakte der philosophischen Fakultät betreffend Prof. von Schlegel’. Bonn Universitätsarchiv PF-PA 478 (1).

180 These in letters to Rehfues, in chronological order of mention. Bonn Universitäts bibliothek, S 1392 (4), (8), (13), (unnumbered); Briefe, II, 226.

181 As, for instance, Bezold, 239-246 ; Erich Rothacker, ‘Berühmte Bonner Professoren’, Kriegsvorträge der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn am Rhein (Bonn : Universitäts-Druckerei, 1943), 11-43, ref. 14 ; Walter Schirmer, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel als Bonner Professor 1818-1845’, in : Konrad Repgen and Stephan Skalweit (eds), Spiegel der Geschichte. Festgabe für Max Braubach zum 10. April 1964 (Münster : Aschendorff, 1964), 699-710 ; idem, ‘August Wilhelm von Schlegel 1767-1845’, in : Bonner Gelehrte. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Bonn. Sprachwissenschaften, 150 Jahre Rheinische Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn 1818-1968 (Bonn : Bouvier, Röhrscheid, 1970), 11-20. A more balanced view in Max Braubach, Kleine Geschichte der Universität Bonn 1818-1968 (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1968), 20.

182 Cf. Bisset Hawkins, Germany; the Spirit of her History, Literature, Social Condition, and National Economy […] (London: Parker, 1838), ix, 117-121, ref. 118; [Anon.], The University of Bonn: its Rise, Progress, & Present State [….] (London: Parker, 1844), 78f.

183 Krisenjahre, II, 380.

184 Vorlesungen über Encyclopädie [1803]. Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen [KAV], III, ed. Frank Jolles and Edith Höltenschmidt (Paderborn etc : Schöningh, 2006), 371.

185 Indische Bibliothek, II, 466.

186 Oeuvres, III, 245.

187 Briefe, I, 605; ‘Meine liebe Marie’—‘Werthester Herr Professor’. Briefwechsel zwischen August Wilhelm von Schlegel und seiner Bonner Haushälterin Maria Löbel. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Ralf Georg Czapla and Franca Victoria Schankweiler (Bonn: Bernstein, 2012), 41. (This exemplary edition is generally informative of AWS’s Bonn years.)

188 Ibid.

189 Briefe, I, 379.

190 Höroldt, 97.

191 Opuscula, 360-379, 380-385, 385-396. See Neuhausen, ‘August Wihelm Schlegel in Bonn’.

192 Opuscula, 397-399.

193 Faustam navigationem regis augustissimi et potentissimi Frederici Guilemi III. Quum universo populo acclamante navi vaporibus acta Bonnam praeterveheretur […]’. Trans. as Die Rheinfahrt Sr. Majestät des Königs von Preußen […], bilingual edition Berlin : Nauck, 1825. Opuscula, 434-435; SW, II, 41f. (as ‘Die Huldigung des Rheins’). See Georg Czapla, ‘Der Rhein als Bühne des technischen Fortschritts. August Wilhelm von Schlegels Elegie auf die Dampfschiffahrt des Preußenkönigs Friedrich Wilhelm III’, in: Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann and Ulrich Eigler (eds), Latein am Rhein (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2015), 1-20

194 The first poem may well be Coleridge’s ‘Youth and Age’ (1823). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Poetical Works, I, ii, ed. J. C. C. Mays, Bollingen Series, LXXV (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), 1011-1013. Cf. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder. How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: HarperPress, 2008), 382f.

195 Emil Sulger-Gebing, Die Brüder A. W. und F. Schlegel in ihrem Verhältnisse zur bildenden Kunst, Forschungen zur neueren Litteraturgeschichte, 3 (Munich: Haushalter, 1897), 173, 181-187.

196 On this subject see Sulger-Gebing, 187-189; Heinrich Schrörs, Die Bonner Universitätsaula und ihre Wandgemälde (Bonn: Hanstein, 1906); Schlegel’s memorandum, 73-75. On fresco technique, Latin description, Opuscula, 368f.

197 The figures are explained by Schrörs, 50-62 and illustrated in Ilse Riemer, Bildchronik der Bonner Universität. Ein Rückblick ins 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Stollfuss, 1968), 28f. The frescoes were destroyed in the air raid on Bonn of 18 October, 1944.

198 Anschlag für auswärtige Besucher am Schwarzen Brett des Königlichen Museums vaterländischer Alterthümer der Rheinlande und Westphalens’, Bonn Universitätsbibliothek, Autogr. [‘Handschrift von A. W. v. Schlegel’].

199 For a contemporary account of its setting up and of the works on display see F. G. Welcker, Das akademische Kunstmuseum zu Bonn (Bonn: Weber, 1827). See also Jahrbuch, 424. Correspondence relating to the University collection in Peter Hesselmann, ‘Unveröffentlichte Briefe von August Wilhelm Schlegel’, Athenäum (1995-96), 345-350, ref. 346f. See also Wilfred Geominy, ‘Die Welckersche Archäologie’, in: Calder III (1986), 230-250, ref. 242-244; Himmelmann, ibid., 278.

200 Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm von Humboldt und August Wilhelm Schlegel, ed. Albert Leitzmann (Halle: Niemeyer, 1908), 46.

201 Opuscula, 394.

202 Fast täglich durchfliege ich die schöne Umgegend auf edlen und muthigen Rossen.’ Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel. Briefe. Auf der Grundlage der von Henry Lüdeke besorgten Edition neu herausgegeben und kommentiert von Edgar Lohner (Munich: Winkler, 1972), 184.

203 Höroldt, 177.

204 Ibid., 59.

205 Kaufmann (1933), 235.

206 Werner Deetjen, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel in Bonn’, Spenden aus der Weimarer Bibliothek, 15, Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde NF 20 (1928), 16-20, ref. 17f., 20.

207 Schlegel since 1818. Adolf Dyroff, Festschrift zur Feier des 150jährigen Bestehens der Lese- und Erholungs-Gesellschaft zu Bonn 1787-1937 (Bonn : Scheur, 1937), 111.

208 Georg Christian Burchardi, Lebenserinnerungen eines Schleswig-Holsteiners, ed. Wilhelm Klüver, Bücher Nordelbingens, Reihe I, ii (Flensburg: Verlag des Kunstgewerbemuseums, 1927), 104

209 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (17), 26.

210 Ibid. (29), 45.

211 An illustration in Czapla/Schankweiler, between pp. 108 and 109 [plate 2].

212 ich besitze selbst eine kleine Sammlung von Idolen’. Indische Bibliothek, II, 43.

213 ‘Neigung zu mündlichen Vorträgen’. Leitzmann, 102.

214 Indische Bibliothek, II, 17.

215 Krisenjahre, II, 409.

216 Abriß vom Studium der classischen Philologie’. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, IV (4). See Josef Körner, ‘Ein philologischer Studienplan August Wilhelm Schlegels’, Die Erziehung 7 (1932), 373-379. See also AWS’s draft ‘Historischer Studienplan’ of 1835, ibid., IV (3). Cf. ‘Iure itaque doctae antiquitatis opes litterarae, quarum in atrio quasi ianitrix ars grammatica sedet, ad penetralia deducit ars critica, in erudienda pueritia atque adolescentia ingenuorum principum locum occupant’. Opuscula, 430.

217 Ibid., 427.

218 Indische Bibliothek, I, 277-294.

219 These are: ‘Vorlesungen über das akademische Studium’ (first 1819-20), published as: Vorlesungen über das akademische Studium, ed. Frank Jolles, Bonner Vorlesungen, 1 (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1971); ‘Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Poesie’ (first 1818- 19), full text published as: A. W. Schlegel, Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Poesie. Vorlesungen, gehalten an der Universität Bonn seit dem Wintersemester 1818/19, ed. Josef Körner, Deutsche Literaturdenkmale des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 147 (Berlin: Behr, 1913), with additions in Fiedler, A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures (1944) (Bisset Hawkins’s remarks on German literature are based on Toynbee’s notes, Bisset Hawkins, viiif.); ‘Entwurf zu Vorlesungen über die allgemeine Weltgeschichte’ (first 1821-22), unpublished, SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XXIX; ‘Einleitung in die allgemeine Weltgeschichte’ (first 1821), unpublished, ibid. XXVIII; ‘Antiquitates Etruscae’ (1822), Opuscula, 115-286; ‘Geschichte der Griechen und Römer’ (first 1822-23), unpublished, SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. XXX (now only partially decipherable). The lectures on the fine arts given in Bonn, while covering similar ground, are textually different from those given in in Berlin in 1827. ‘Vorlesungen über Theorie und allgemeine Geschichte der bildenden Künste’ (first 1819), ibid., XXXI.

220 Menzel, 137; Wilhelm Dorow, Erlebtes, 4 vols (Leipzig: Hinrichsen, 1843-45), III, 270.

221 Vorlesungen über das akademische Studium, 61.

222 Toynbee, 9f. On Toynbee see Gustav Hübener, ‘Ein Engländer über Bonn vor hundert Jahren’, Bonner Mitteilungen 13 (1934), 28-32.

223 Franz Bosbach, ‘Einleitung—Fürstliche Studienplanung und Studiengestaltung’, in: FB (ed.), Die Studien des Prinzen Albert an der Universität Bonn (1837-1838), Prinz-Albert- Forschungen, 5 (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2010), 13-44, ref. 33.

224 Otto Ribbeck, Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philologie, 2 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1879, 1881), II, 13-14, 476.

225 Leitzmann, 110.

226 See Gertrud Richert, Die Anfänge der romanischen Philologie und die deutsche Romantik, Beiträge zur Geschichte der romanischen Sprachen und Literaturen, 10 (Halle : Niemeyer, 1914), 37-68, correspondence with Raynouard (48f.), Fauriel (54-56) and Diez (59-62).

227 Leitzmann, 61f., 110. ‘Pourvu qu’ils aient du talent et de la persévérance’. Oeuvres, III, 239.

228 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, LIV, LV.

229 ‘Inscriptionslisten seiner Zuhörer’. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, V, 21. Ag. No. 62000, 201.

230 The fees charged by a professor for attendance at a private lecture seem to have averaged at about 100 talers per semester, and were often much more. Bosbach, ‘Fürstliche Studienplanung’, 37f.

231 Such a one for Schlegel’s lecture on ‘Alte Weltgeschichte’ is reproduced in Reinhard Tgahrt et al. (ed.), Weltliteratur. Die Lust am Übersetzen im Jahrhundert Goethes (Munich: Kösel, 1982), 507, 522.

232 Heine was inscribed for ‘Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Poesie’ (winter 1819- 20), and ‘Lied der Nibelungen’ and ‘Deutsche Verskunst’ (summer 1820).

233 Hess heard ‘Römische Geschichte’ (winter 1828-29, summer 1831), ‘Deutsche Sprache’ (winter 1830-31) and ‘Deutsche Verskunst’ (summer 1833).

234 Marx heard ‘Einige Homerische Fragen’ (winter 1835-36) and ‘Ausgewählte Elegien des Propertius’ (summer 1836).

235 Letter of Haupt to AWS expressing indebtedness to his studies on the Nibelungenlied. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (10), 21.

236 The University of Bonn, 171.

237 Ibid., 78.

238 Undated letters to AWS. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (9), 2-3.

239 The University of Bonn, xiv.

240 Information in Amtliches Verzeichniß des Personals und der Studirenden auf der Königlichen Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn (unpag.) for 1838-39, 1839-40, 1840, 1840-41, 1841.

241 See Franz Bosbach, ‘Prinz Albert und das universitäre Studium in Bonn und Cambridge’, in: Christa Jansohn (ed.), In the Footsteps of Queen Victoria: Wege zum Viktorianischen Zeitalter, Studien zur englischen Literatur, 15 (Münster, etc.: LIT, 2003), 201-224, ref. 208.

242 Bosbach, ‘Fürstliche Studienplanung’, 33, 37f.

243 Not for the reason adduced by Renger (1983), that they were already published (222). They were not

244 The University of Bonn, 171.

245 Brockhaus to AWS 1840 (SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (3), 86); Goldstücker to AWS 1840 (ibid. (9), 41); Hammerich to AWS 1837 (ibid. (14), 7). Lassen’s letters, much more extensive, in: Briefwechsel A. W. von Schlegel Christian Lassen, ed. W. Kirfel [Kirfel] (Bonn: Cohen, 1914).

246 Kirfel, 13. On AWS’s school see Ernst Windisch, Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie und indischen Altertumskunde, 2 vols (Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde [Encyclopedia of Indo-Aryan Research], I, iB) (Strasbourg : Trübner, 1917 ; Berlin, Leipzig : de Gruyter, 1920), II, 210-215.

247 On the links between the Berlin, Bonn and Berlin (1827) cycles see Frank Jolles, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel und Berlin: Sein Weg von den Berliner Vorlesungen von 1801-04 zu denen vom Jahre 1827’, in: Otto Pöggeler and Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (eds), Kunsterfahrung und Kulturpolitik im Berlin Hegels, Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 22 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983), 153-[175].

248 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XVIII, [p. 15f.].

249 Aeneid, X, 501.

250 Cf. Thomas Campbell: ‘In fine, Mons. Schlegel is a visionary and a Platonist, who really believes that the external universe is only a shadow or reflexion of the inward principle of mind.’ Thomas Campbell, II, 262.

251 ‘Theorie und allgemeine Geschichte der bildenden Künste’, 33f. ; AWS, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik (1803-1827), ed. Ernst Behler assist. Georg Braungart, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen [KAV], II, i (Paderborn, etc. : Schöningh, 2007), 333.

252 Leitzmann, 72.

253 Ibid.

254 Geschichte der Griechen und Römer’, 16a.

255 Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Poesie, 24.

256 Einleitung in die alte Weltgeschichte’, 37; Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Poesie, 30f.; ‘Griechen und Römer’, 17. His Indische Bibliothek also quotes Alexander von Humboldt. I, i, 35. Cf. also the later fragment, ‘Ueber historische und geographische Bestimmungen der Zoologie’, SW, VIII, 334-336.

257 Einleitung in die allgemeine Weltgeschichte’, 68; ‘Theorie und allgemeine Geschichte der bildenden Künste’, KAV, II, i, 307.

258 Cf. H. B. Nisbet, ‘Die naturphilosophische Bedeutung von Herders “Aeltester Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts“’, in: Brigitte Poschmann (ed.), Bückeburger Gespräche über Johann Gottfried Herder 1988. Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, Schaumburger Studien, 49 (Rinteln: Bösendahl, 1989), 210-226, and generally D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology. Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1972), esp. 20, 220f.

259 ‘De l’Origine des Hindous’, Oeuvres, III, 62.

260 Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Poesie, 30.

261 Griechen und Römer’, 15.

262 Einleitung in die allgemeine Weltgeschichte’, 120.

263 Entwurf zu Vorlesungen über die allgemeine Weltgeschichte’, 62.

264 Colossale Wunderwerke der alten Welt’, ‘Einleitung in die allgemeine Weltgeschichte’, 145.

265 I. C. Prichard, Darstellung der Aegyptischen Mythologie […] ( Bonn: Weber, 1837), v-xxxiv.

266 SW, XII, 513-528; Roger Paulin, August Wilhelm Schlegels Kosmos (Dresden: Thelem, 2011), 9f.

267 Weltumsegler der Wißenschaft’, SW, VIII, 213.

268 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (11), 26.

269 Ibid., 35.

270 Ibid., LI (17). On this Roger Paulin, ‘Die Ähnlichkeit der Götter. Ein Billet Alexander von Humboldts an August Wilhelm Schlegel in der SLUB Dresden’, BIS: Das Magazin der Bibliotheken in Sachsen 3 (September 2010), 174f.

271 August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel im Briefwechsel mit Schiller und Goethe, ed. Josef Körner and Ernst Wieneke [Wieneke] (Leipzig: Insel, 1926), 161f.

272 Krisenjahre, II, 394.

273 ‘Indien in seinen Hauptbeziehungen. Einleitung. Über die Zunahme und den gegenwärtigen Stand unserer Kenntnisse von Indien’, Berliner Kalender auf das Gemein- Jahr 1829 (Berlin : Kön. Preuß. Kalender-Deputation [1828], ‘Erste Abtheilung bis auf Vasco de Gama’, 3-86 ; Zweite Abtheilung. ‘Von Vasco de Gama bis auf die neueste Zeit’, Berliner Kalender auf das Gemein-Jahr 1831 (Berlin : Kön : Preuß : Kalender-Deputation [1830]), 3-160, on the Lusiads 68-75.

274 Cf. the minor Camões renaissance around 1830, esp. Tieck’s novel Tod des Dichters (1833).

275 Briefe, I, 528.

276 Krisenjahre, II, 428.

277 Well summarized in the article by Johannes Mehlig, ‘Indien’, in: Goethe-Handbuch, ed. Bernd Witte et al., 4 vols in 5 (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1996-99), IV, i, 521-524. Cf. also Anil Bhatti, ‘Der Orient als Experimentierfeld. Goethes “Divan” und der Aneignungsprozess kolonialen Wissens’, Goethe Jahrbuch, 126 (2009), 115-128, esp. 126f.

278 ‘Von Pfaffen und Fratzen uns befreit’. Zahme Xenien, II. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler, 3rd edn, 27 vols (Zurich: Artemis, 1986 [1949]), I, 615.

279 Wieneke, 162f., 260.

280 Karl S. Guthke, Goethes Weimar und ‘Die große Öffnung in die weite Welt’, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 93 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 20-22.

281 Cf. ‘Die Religion Mahomets, des unwissendendsten aller Menschen, war freilich darauf eingerichtet, die Unwissenheit und den Stumpfsinn gegen jede Art der Geistesbildung unter ihren Anhängern zu verewigen’. Berliner Kalender auf das Gemein-Jahr 1829, 69.

282 ‘Les Mille et une nuits. Receuil de contes originairement indiens’, Oeuvres, III, 3-23.

283 ‘Nous devons imiter l’impassibilité de ces brahmanes dont nous admirons les sages maximes’, ibid, 245.

284 ich besitze selbst eine kleine Sammlung von Idolen’. Indische Bibliothek, II, 431.

285 Berliner Kalender (1831), 122.

286 Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit’. [Captured Greece captured the uncouth victor]. Horace, Epistles, 2, I, 156.

287 Cf. Josef Körner, ‘Indologie und Humanität’, most accessible in: JK, Philologische Schriften und Briefe, ed. Ralf Klausnitzer, intr. Hans Eichner, Marbacher Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 1 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 137-162; Anil Bhatti, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegels Indienrezeption und der Kolonialismus’, in: Jürgen Lehmann et al. (eds), Konflikt Grenze Dialog. Kulturkontrastive und interdisziplinäre Textzugänge. Festschrift für Horst Turk zum 60. Geburtstag (Frankfurt am Main etc.: Peter Lang, 1997), 185-205.

288 Berliner Kalender (1829), 5.

289 Berliner Kalender (1831), 138f., 155.

290 Neueste Mittheilungen der Asiatischen Gesellschaft zu Calcutta’, Indische Bibliothek, I, 371-390.

291 Ibid., 371.

292 Ibid., 388.

293 C. Ritter, ‘Landeskunde von Indien’, Berliner Kalender auf das Gemein-Jahr 1829, 87-210, plate facing p. 364.

294 Kirfel, 74f.

295 Leitzmann, 245f.

296 Briefe, I, 531.

297 In: Journal Asiatique 4 (1824), 105-116, 236-252; 5 (1824), 240-252; 6 (1825), 232-250.

298 Leitzmann, 61.

299 Ibid., 165.

300 Ibid., 214.

301 Oppeln-Bronikowski, 426 ; Carl Ritter, Die Vorhalle Europäischer Völkergeschichten vor Herodotus, um den Kaukasus und an den Gestaden des Pontus. Eine Abhandlung zur Alterthumskunde (Berlin: Reimer, 1820).

302 Indische Bibliothek, II, 373-473; Heeren’s ignorance is also alluded to in Râmâyana, Praef., lv; Heeren had informed AWS of his election to honorary membership of the Göttingen Academy. Briefe, I, 338. Cf. his dignified reply: Etwas über meine Studien des alten Indiens von A. H. L. Heeren. Antwort an Herrn Prof. A. W. v. Schlegel auf dessen an mich gerichtete drei ersten Briefe in seiner Indischen Bibliothek (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1827).

303 Réflexions sur l’étude des langues asiatiques adressées à Sir James Mackintosh, suivies d’une lettre à M. Horace Hayman Wilson, ancien secrétaire de la Société Asiatique à Calcutta, élu professeur à Oxford (Bonn : Weber, 1832) ; Oeuvres, III, 95-275.

304 Lettre à M. Horace Hayman Wilson’, ibid., 212-246.

305 Ibid., 24-94. Published three times in AWS’s lifetime: Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature in the United Kingdom 2 (1834), 405-446; Nouvelles Annales des voyages 4 (1838), 137-214; Essais littéraires et historiques, 439-518.

306 Oeuvres, II, 281.

307 Ibid., III, 62.

308 Ibid., II, 80, 83. On Celts cf. his ‘Aphorismen die Etymologie des Französischen betreffend’, SW, VII, 269-271. James Cowles Prichard, The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations […] (1831) ; Adolphe Pictet, ‘Lettres à M. A. W. de Schlegel, sur l’affinité des langues celtiques avec le sanscrit’, Journal asiatique, 3e série, 1 (1836), 263-290, 417-448 ; 2 (1836), 440-466. AWS’s position retracted somewhat in the foreword to his translation of Prichard (1838), vf.

309 Briefe, I, 472f., II, 208f.; the insights of these essays summed up in Latin, Opuscula, 402‑414. Karl S. Guthke, ‘Benares am Rhein—Rom am Ganges. Die Begegnung von Orient und Okzident im Denken A. W. Schlegels’, Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts, 1978, 396-419.

310 Berliner Kalender (1831), 122.

311 Ibid., 125.

312 Correspondence with Schilling von Canstatt, Briefe, I, 630f. ; Choix de lettres d’Eugène Bournouf 1825-1852 (Paris : Champion, 1891), 508f. ; SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XX (48-51).

313 Leitzmann, 73f., 187f.

314 Ibid., 195.

315 Ibid., 231-238.

316 AWS, ‘Observations sur la critique du Bhagavad-Gîtâ, insérée dans le Journal Asiatique’, Journal Asiatique 9 (1826), 3-27 ; cf. also [Wilhelm von Humboldt], ‘Ueber die Bhagavad- Gita. Mit Bezug auf die Beurtheilung der Schlegelschen Ausgabe im Pariser Asiatischen Journal’, Indische Bibliothek II (1826), Heft 2, 218-258, Heft 3, 328-372, which appeared concurrently.

317 Contents (by AWS unless otherwise indicated): I (1820, reissued 1823 with new title page): Heft 1 (1820) [ii-xiii] dedication; ix-xvi Vorrede; 1-27 ‘Ueber den gegenwärtigen Zustand der Indischen Philologie’; 28-96 ‘Indische Dichtungen’ (incl. ‘Die Herabkunft der Göttin Ganga’); 97-128 ‘Ausgaben Indischer Bücher’ (review of Bopp’s 1819 ed. of Nalus); Heft 2 (1820): 129-231 ‘Zur Geschichte des Elephanten’; 232-256 ‘Indische Sphinx’ (a miscellany of the learned and the curious); Heft 3 (1822): 257-273 ‘Die Einsiedelei des Kandu’ (Chézy); 274-294 ‘De studio etymologico’; 295-364 ‘Wilsons Wörterbuch’; 365-370 ‘Nachrichten’ (miscellany); Heft 4 (1823): 371-432 ‘Neueste Mittheilungen der Asiatischen Gesellschaft zu Calcutta’; 433-467 ‘Ueber die in der Sanskrit-Sprache […] gebildeten Verbalformen’ (W. von Humboldt); II (reissued 1827 with a new title page): Heft 1 (1824); 1-70 ‘Allgemeine Uebersicht’; 72-134 ‘Ueber die in der Sanskrit- Sprache […] gebildeten Verbalformen’ (W. von Humboldt); Heft 2 (1826): 135-148 ‘Ankündigung’ (prospectus of Râmâyana); 149-217 ‘Briefwechsel’ (synopsis of Sanskrit dramas; letter of German missionary in South India); 218-258 ‘Ueber die Bhagavat- Gita. Mit Bezug auf die Beurtheilung der Schlegelschen Ausgabe im Pariser Asiatischen Journal’ (Wilhelm von Humboldt); Heft 3 (1826): 259-283 ‘Indische Erzählungen’; 284-327 ‘Indische Sphinx’; 328-372 ‘Ueber die Bhagavad-Gita’ (cont.); Heft 4 (1827): 373-473 ‘An Herrn Professor Heeren in Göttingen’; 474 ‘Zwei Epigramme’; III (1830): 1-113 ‘Ueber Professor Bopps grammatisches System der Sanskrit-Sprache’ (Lassen); 114 ‘Denksprüche aus dem Sanskrit’.

318 Neues Repertorium für Biblische und Morgenländische Litteratur, 2 parts (Jena, 1790). See Andrea Polaschegg, Derandere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert, Quellen und Forschungen zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, 35 (269) (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2005), 160, 181.

319 Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May, & June, 1861, 3rd edn (London: Longman, Green, 1862), 164, 167.

320 Leitzmann, 87.

321 Sanscrit Poetry’, The Quarterly Review, XLV (1831), 1-57, ref. 4.

322 Friedrich Schlegels Briefe an seinen Bruder August Wilhelm, ed. Oskar F. Walzel [Walzel] (Berlin: Speyer & Peters, 1890), 653.

323 Indische Bibliothek, I, 34f. Cf. Josef Körner, ‘Indologie und Humanität’, 137-160 ; Guthke (1978), 413-417.

324 Burnouf, Choix de lettres, 34.

325 Indische Bibliothek, I, 129-231.

326 Meyers Lexikon. 7. Auflage, 12 vols and 3 supplements (Leipzig : Bibliographisches Institut, 1924-33), III, 1435-1437.

327 Und so will ich, ein- für allemal, Keine Bestien in dem Götter-Saal! Die leidigen Elefanten-Rüssel, Das umgeschlungene Schlangen-Genüssel’. Zahme Xenien, II. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe, I, 615.

328 Indische Bibliothek, I, 28-96.

329 Ibid., 31.

330 Ibid., 235-242.

331 Ibid., 400-425.

332 Ibid., 32f.

333 Ibid., 50-96.

334 Cf. the section ‘Indische Gedichte’ in his Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1808), 221-324.

335 The sections ‘Wiswamitra’s Büßungen. Eine Episode aus dem Ramajana’, ‘Der Kampf mit dem Riesen. Aus dem Mahâbhârat’ and ‘Einige Stellen aus den Veda’s’ by Windischmann, appended to Franz Bopp, Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache (Frankfurt am Main: Andreä, 1816), 159-235, 237-269, 271-312.

336 Indische Bibliothek, II, 254f. Reprinted in Hans Joachim Störig (ed.), Das Problem des Übersetzens, Wege der Forschung, 8 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 98.

337 Quarterly Review (1831), 5.

338 Oeuvres, III, 183.

339 Briefe, I, 378f.

340 Indische Bibliothek, II, 45f. ; also Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Praef., xiif.

341 Indische Bibliothek, I, i, 97-128.

342 Briefe, I, 387f.

343 Krisenjahre, II, 365f.; Czapla/Schankweiler, 32.

344 For most of what follows see W. Kirfel, ‘Die Anfänge des Sanskrit-Druckes in Europa’, Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 32 (1915), 274-280.

345 Indische Bibliothek, I, 22.

346 Ibid., 97.

347 Paris address list SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XI, IVb.

348 Briefe, I, 380.

349 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (18) 89. Abel-Rémusat’s letters to AWS ibid., 87-99.

350 ‘M. Fauriel’, in Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, ed. Michel Brix (Paris : PUPS, 2008), 1227-1316, ref. 1302f. A letter of Fauriel to AWS (‘mon toujours cher Pandita’) in Gertrud Richert, Die Anfänge der romanischen Philologie, 94-96.

351 Indische Bibliothek, I, 368-370; technical description II, 36f.

352 Bonn UB, S 1435.

353 There follow a further 12 lines of title page. (Lutetiae Parisiorum: Crapelet, 1821).

354 Rehfues to Schlegel 26 April 1822, in: Kirfel (1915), 278.

355 The Journal Asiatique prints a letter from Altenstein authorizing the Sanskrit press to be placed at the disposal of the society. Journal Asiatique 4 (1824), 117. The society was soliciting AWS’s advice still in 1832. Burnouf, 459f.

356 SLUB Dresden, Mscr.Dresd. e. 90. XI, I, 4.

357 Krisenjahre, II, 421.

358 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, II, 17.

359 Briefe, I, 392f.

360 Ibid., 405.

361 Ibid., 393.

362 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, II, 57.

363 Cf. Norman King, ‘Lettres de Madame de Staël à Sir James Mackintosh’, Cahiers staëliens, 10 (1970), 27-54, ref. 44.

364 Krisenjahre, II, 421.

365 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX, 15 (21).

366 Ibid. (6).

367 Râmâyana, Praefatio, xlvii.

368 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XLIX (21).

369 For much of which follows see the informative edition by Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher, Founders of Western Indology. August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Henry Thomas Colebrooke in Correspondence 1820-1837, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 84 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), here 85.

370 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (14), 14.

371 Râmâyana, I, i, 161; SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (15), 68; Rocher and Rocher (2013), 88f.

372 Rocher and Rocher (2013), 80-87.

373 Ibid., 28; on Colebrooke see Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher, The Making of Western Indology. Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company, Royal Asiatic Society Books (London, New York: Routledge, 2011), 139-146.

374 Indische Bibliothek, I, 22.

375 Ibid., I, 12f.

376 Rocher and Rocher (2013), 29-32.

377 A rare exception is his letter to the Directors of the East India Company, Oeuvres, III, 255-257.

378 Rocher and Rocher (2011), 41.

379 Ibid., 61.

380 Briefe, I, 405-411.

381 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (25), 63 (letter of Adam Sedgwick, 10 January, 1845).

382 Leitzmann, 154.

383 ‘De zodiaci antiquitate et origine’, Opuscula, 349.

384 SLUB Dresden Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (3), 123.

385 Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

386 Briefe, I, 461.

387 Kaufmann, ‘Zur Erinnerung’, 246f.; Deetjen, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel in Bonn’, 18.

388 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (23), 100.

389 Czapla/Schankweiler, 165f.

390 A testimonial for him by AWS in SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XX (1), 4.

391 Rocher and Rocher (2013), 179, 181.

392 Kirfel, 22.

393 Ibid., 29.

394 Ibid., 87f.

395 Râmâyana, Praef., lxixf.

396 Burnouf, 2.

397 Essai sur le pali […] par E. Burnouf et Chr. Lassen (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1826).

398 Information in the Index praelectionum.

399 Kirfel, 204.

400 Ibid., 229. The section from Bonn to Cologne was completed in 1844.

401 Ibid., 218.

402 Ibid., 209.

403 SLUB Dresden. Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX, 4 (3), 1. Letter of 21 December 1832 (they had seen Marion Delorme).

404 Addresses and invitations SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XI, V. B.

405 Indische Bibliothek, II, 68.

406 List of subscribers in a letter to Treuttel & Würtz 1828. SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (27) 29.

407 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XI, V. B.

408 Briefe, I, 497f.

409 Kirfel, 214f.

410 hat entsetzlich viel gekostet’. Lohner, 210.

411 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, II, 51.

412 Ibid., XIX (29), 13.

413 Oeuvres, III, 311.

414 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (10), 42.

415 Körner, ‘Indologie und Humanität’, 160; Bhatti, ‘Indienrezeption’, 201.

416 Körner, 159.

417 Briefe, I, 500f.

418 Ibid., II, 227.

419 Kirfel, 217.

420 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (15), 95 (Lord Munster), ibid., 12 (Mackintosh).

421 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (15), 19.

422 The account of what follows set out in Rocher and Rocher (2013), 165f.

423 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, XIX (15), 13.

424 Letter of 29 Sept 1817, Murray Archive Ms. 40165, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland.

425 Briefe, I, 632.

426 To Rehfues (undated) UB Bonn S 1392.

427 Thomas Campbell less flattering. Campbell, I, 362.

428 Correspondence AWS to Murray, 9 Nov., 1831, 6 March and 2 April, 1832. AWS’s manuscript received by Murray 1 March and returned 7 March, 1832. Murray Archive, Ms. 40165 and 42633, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland.

429 See Rocher and Rocher (2013), 167 and sources quoted there.

430 They subscribed to just ten copies. Oeuvres, III, 257.

431 ‘Eh, monsieur, si je n’avais pas honte de parler des sacrifices pécuniaires que j’ai faits pour faciliter l’étude du Sanscrit.’ Ibid., 242.

432 Bhagavad-Gita, id est ΘΕΣΠΕΣΙΟΝ ΜΕΛΟΣ, sive almi Krishnae et Arjunae colloquium de rebus divinis, Bharateae episodium. Textum recensuit, adnotationes criticas et interpretationem Latinam adiecit Augustus Guilelmus a Schlegel (Bonn : In Academia Borussica Rhenana typis regiis MDCCCXXIII [Bonn : Weber, 1823]) ; Ramayana id est carmen epicum de Ramae rebus gestis poetae antiquissimi Valmicis opus. Textum codd. mss. collatis recensuit interpretationem Latinam et annotationes criticas adiecit Augustus Guilelmus a Schlegel, 2 vols in 3 (Bonnae ad Rhenum : Typis Regiis. Sumtibus Editoris 1828, 1829); HITOPADESAS id est institutio salutaris. Textum codd. mss. collatis recensuerunt interpretationem Latinam et annotationes criticas adiecerunt Augustus Guilelmus a Schlegel et Christianus Lassen, 2 parts (Bonnae ad Rhenum: Weber, 1829, 1831) (AWS was responsible for Book 1, Lassen for Book 2).

433 Bhagavat-Gîtâ, Praef., vii.

434 Briefe, II, 222.

435 Cf. Schlegel’s report to Altenstein in 1829, Briefe, II, 212-224.

436 Râmâyana […] Adverstisement (London, November, 1823), 8; Briefe, II, 213; SLUB Dresden Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, X.

437 Briefe, II, 213.

438 The East India College subscribed generously to AWS’s Bhagavad-Gîtâ (40 copies), because it was a useful new edition; it subscribed to his Râmâyana to the tune of 10 copies (a considerable outlay); but it had sufficient copies of an older edition of the Hitopadeśa (communication from Rosane and Ludo Rocher).

439 Briefe, I, 612f. The half-title of vol. 1 of Râmâyana has ‘Rameidos Valmiceiae libri septem’.

440 Indische Bibliothek, II, 141, 147; Râmâyana […] Advertisement, 1-8, ref. 7.

441 Indische Bibliothek, II, 138, 146.

442 SLUB Dresden, Mscr. Dresd. e. 90, LIII.

443 Arthur Schopenhauer, Werke in fünf Bänden, ed. Ludger Lütkehans, 5 vols and 1 supplement, Haffmanns Taschenbuch, 121-126 (Zurich: Haffmans, 1988-91), III, 631; V, 348.

444 Bhagavad- Gîtâ. Des Erhabenen Sang, trans. Leopold von Schroeder, Religiöse Stimmen der Völker: Die Religion des Alten Indien, 2 (Jena: Diederichs, 1919), ii.

445 Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Praef., xxiii; Hitopadeśa, I, xvi.

446 Nalus Maha-Bharati episodium. Textus Sanscritus cum interpretatione Latina et annotationibus criticis curante Franciscus Bopp, 2nd ed (Berlolini: Nicolai, 1827). On Schlegel’s fraught relationship with Bopp see Ralf Georg Czapla, ‘Annäherungen an das ferne Fremde. August Wilhelm Schlegels Kontroverse mit Friedrich Rückert und Franz Bopp über die Vermittlung von indischer Religion und Mythologie’, Jahrbuch der Rückert-Gesellschaft, 17 (2006-07), 131-151.

447 Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Praef., xxvi, Adnott., 126.

448 Ibid., Praef., xxvi.

449 Ueber die unter dem Namen Bhagavad-Gita bekannte Episode des Maha-Bharata’ (1825-26).

450 Râmâyana […] Advertisement (London, November 1823), 1-8. The same in French and German in Indische Bibliothek, II, 135-148.

451 Advertisement, refs 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

452 Râmâyana, Praef., xx.

453 Râmâyana, Praef., lxix.

Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 23 August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cours de littérature dramatique. Traduit de l’allemand (Paris, Geneva, 1814). Title page of vol. 1.
Crédits © And by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 120k
Titre Fig. 24 Jahrbuch der Preußischen Rhein-Universität (Bonn, 1819). Frontispiece issued 1821.
Crédits © And by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 116k
Titre Fig. 25 ‘Aula’. Illustration from Die rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn (Bonn, 1839).
Crédits Image in the public domain.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 320k
Titre Fig. 26 ‘Inskriptions-Liste’. Attendance list for August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lecture ‘Deutsche Verskunst’, summer semester 1820, showing Heinrich Heine’s name at the bottom.
Crédits © SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 112k
Titre Fig. 27 ‘Inskriptions-Liste’. Attendance list for August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lecture ‘Einige homerische Fragen’, winter semester 1835‑36. Karl Marx’s name is marked ‘+6’.
Crédits © SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 84k
Titre Fig. 28 Indische Bibliothek. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm von Schlegel (Bonn, 1820- 1830). Title page issued in 1823.
Crédits © And by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BYNC 4.0.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 172k
Titre Fig. 29 Schlegel’s Certificate of Departure from the Port of Dover, 19 November 1823, with description of his appearance.
Crédits © SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 128k
Titre Fig. 30 Auguste von Buttlar, pencil drawing after the engraving by Jean Bein based on the painting by François Gérard, ‘Corinne au cap Misène’ (1819), 1824.
Crédits © Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, all rights reserved.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 172k
Titre Fig. 31 Schlegel’s invitation to the palace of the Tuileries, dated 8 October, 1831.
Crédits © SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 124k
Titre Fig. 32 Schlegel’s receipt for the ‘Silver Dress Star of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order’, 20 March, 1832.
Crédits © SLUB Dresden, all rights reserved.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 228k
Titre Fig. 33 Râmâyana. Schlegel’s edition, part 1 of vol. 1 (Bonn, 1829). Title page.
Crédits © And by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, CC BY-NC 4.0.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/2961/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 108k

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